


The Death of His Mourning

by BrideofCrixus



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), The Bane Chronicles - Sarah Rees Brennan & Cassandra Clare & Maureen Johnson
Genre: Assault, Death, Drinking, Drugs, F/M, Language, Masturbation, Murder, Rape, Smoking, Violence, sodomy, something offensive for everyone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:36:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 19
Words: 50,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25945210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrideofCrixus/pseuds/BrideofCrixus
Summary: Post-TDKR, Bane’s life retained with emergency medical intervention, as he heals before facing federal terrorism charges, catches the eye of an eccentric billionaire with peculiar collectible proclivities. A prison transport disrupted. It was supposed to be a simple heist for a priceless antiquity and the criminally desired clean slate. Everything changes at once with nothing to lose except lives. The end of mourning and the birth of love.
Relationships: Bane and oc, Bruce and Selina
Comments: 58
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

Chapter One: Broken, Shattered and Sewn Back Together

The brunt of the projectile’s impact knocked Bane clear across the room where he crashed heavily into a large stone planter. Pure smugness transformed Selina’s face and her lips curled into a toothy smile that was more at home on an equine face as she stayed perched on the Bat Pod. 

The breath was aggressively forced from Bane’s lungs and he heard the fracturing of multiple ribs echo sharply in his ears. His broad back met the unmoving concrete and he landed in a clumsy heap like a discarded rag doll, limbs askew with no sense of order. 

His already damaged mask became essentially useless and his lungs burned as the heavy detritus in the air entered his lungs and caused the fragile alveoli to spasm, his broken chest heaved in its struggle to breathe. His body moved like a reptile without fluidity and grace as his mouth filled with blood from internal damage to organ systems that hovered on the brink of irrevocable failure. 

Bane wanted to make his hands move but couldn’t seem to communicate to his limbs. His skull felt like it was splitting apart at the very seams and he wanted to feel his head to make sure his brain wasn’t exposed to the world. He had a fleeting thought that he might already be dead and was merely experiencing the last neural misfires before his world was cloaked in eternal darkness. 

He managed a breath after he spit out a mouthful of blood and other thicker bits, his vision was reduced to pinpricks and he heard a chorus of voices begin as Gotham’s finest began to pour into the lobby. He could hear their regulation issued boots squeaking as they approached him, fingers were nervous on triggers as they approached the fallen man that had instilled cold fear into the hearts of every inhabitant of Gotham City. Even in this state, Bane still invoked a sickly shroud of fear to fall on every man and woman with a gun and a badge. 

Across the city, Blake, and everyone atop the bridge, watched the detonation of the bomb. The enriched plutonium was forced into a state of fissile supercriticality and without the flying bat’s intervention, would’ve meant the very vaporization of thousands of Gothamites and cancer-causing fallout for generations.   
Blake felt his heart swell at the billionaire’s assumed cowl wearing martyrdom. 

As the mushroom cloud swelled in size, Gordon watched from the center of Gotham after pressing his fingers to the still carotid artery in Talia’s smooth, pale neck. 

He shook his head, despite her skewed ideals, it was still a lost soul to Gordon.

Back in City Hall, the smoke began to clear as law enforcement officers swarmed across the marble tile and surrounded Bane’s broken body.

The officers secured the scene and radioed for the paramedics to bring in a gurney.

From inside Bane’s broken body, his heart pounded erratically inside his broad chest as his lungs filled with fluid and each breath was a musical gurgle. 

The paramedics cleared his airway and secured a breathing tube as he was handcuffed to the gurney. 

Gordon and Blake met at the steps at nearly the same time and raced inside as Bane was being wheeled to the back of the ambulance.

Blake told the medics to back off as he grabbed the end of the gurney and stopped its progress.

“What are you doing?” Gordon rasped.

“With all due respect sir, but what are you doing?”

“Excuse me son?”

“What the fuck are you doing? You’re letting him get medical care?” Blake spit.

Gordon looked over as one of the medic’s started a large bore IV to the crook of Bane’s left arm. Blake’s face was red with fury as he watched the paramedics render aid to the terrorist.

“Fuck him, why bother, you know he’s guilty,” he shouted at Gordon. 

Gordon raised a hand, “no hot shot, we’re doing this by the book, so the charges stick. He’s still a prisoner and is afforded rights.”

“Right? Rights! Fuck due process,” Blake shouted and pulled his firearm and slammed the butt of the gun against Bane’s temple until a fresh-faced officer yanked Blake back. 

From where he lay seemingly unconscious on the cushioned gurney, Bane’s unbloodied eye cracked open at Blake’s gun making contact. 

He committed Blake’s face to memory, “I’ll remember this moment child,” Bane thought as a wave of pain wracked his midsection from a myriad of internal bleeding from lacerated organs. 

“You best rein that bullshit in and unfuck yourself,” Gordon roared.

Blake nodded stiffly, “sir.”

“You can follow in the cruiser,” Gordon said and hopped in the ambulance alongside the medic and Bane’s shattered form. 

Blake watched the ambulance depart, tires spitting gravel and sirens wailing. 

He followed the ambulance at breakneck speed and was forced to wait in the emergency room hallway as Bane was evaluated and quickly shuttled upstairs for open-  
heart surgery.

Blake and Gordon were told they could wait outside the surgical suite in appropriate attire, but the surgeon denied Blake’s request to be in the room.

The surgeon told Blake that he was certain the anesthetic gases and a cracked open ribcage would be enough to hobble the patient. 

Blake clenched his teeth behind his surgical mask until his jaw popped as he watched Bane being wheeled into the large open-heart cardiac suite. 

Bane was expedited to the open-heart surgical suite where the sky-blue sterile drapes were opened, and the sterilized instruments waited to delve into his damaged   
flesh. 

After he was transferred from the gurney to the OR table, the surgical tech Alana Mayfield spread a honey thick surgical prep solution over Bane’s chest and abdomen. 

She smoothed the solution until Bane’s chest resembled a cooked and golden-brown Butterball turkey. 

The cardiothoracic surgeon Karl F. Selanne moved to the other side of Bane’s anesthetized body and together they draped Bane’s chest with vibrantly hued blue surgical drapes. 

Karl drew a line down Bane’s bruised chest to mark his incision. He glanced over the top of his glasses at the large clock and announced the surgical time, procedure as well as pre-surgical diagnosis to the circulating room nurse Ginny Levine. 

Karl felt Alana press the scalpel into his gloved palm and he commenced the surgical start by running the blade down the line he had drawn on Bane’s chest.  
Bane’s flesh parted easily under his unwavering hand and soon Karl could see the glistening and yellow layer of fat in between his dense muscle tissue. Karl passed off his blade and used the sternal saw to cut through the thick notch of bone that formed Bane’s sternum.

The blade sliced through easily, spitting back small bits of bone and gristle before Karl fitted the rib retractor into the chest cavity. He turned the handle until his ribs spread open and his damaged heart fluttered inside his opaque pericardial sac. 

Karl looked over at the anesthesiologist Dr. Cohn, concern staining the middle of his forehead.

“What are his O2 sats and BP?” he asked as he looked down at the weakened heart with an almost expression of love painted across his face and held out his hand for a smaller blade.

“BP 108/62, oxygen at 96% on room air,” Eric Cohn said after checking the monitors. 

“Give him a cardizem bolus,” Karl said to Eric before turning to Ginny. “Get some music on the radio,” he barked and drew his scalpel lightly down the almost translucent but surprising sturdy pericardial sac that entombed Bane’s heart. 

“He has some extra fluid here,” Karl commented to no one in particular and then addressed Ginny specifically as she scrolled through her multiple play lists on her phone. 

“Call in an order for lasix starting post-op and don’t play any of that bullshit music you played last week,” Karl said to Ginny’s back. 

Ginny smiled to herself as she found the play list appropriately titled “Krazy Karl.” 

The bubble gum pop song filled the empty corners of the OR suite.

All at once though, the frown line reappeared in the middle of Karl’s forehead as Bane’s heart began to contort before he could apply the titanium cross clamp. 

“Pressure?” he asked in a commanding yet low voice. 

“88/50, and dropping,” Eric said evenly. “I’m pushing an Esmolol bolus now,” he added as he locked eyes with Karl above Bane’s gaping chest that contained his quivering heart. 

“Cut the music,” he said solemnly as the beeping machines threatened to alarm louder than the new single Ginny had purchased last week.

Bane’s blood was moving sluggishly through his body as Dr. Cohn pushed a bolus and watched the monitor for signs of the drug taking effect and expanding his arteries. Karl called over to Ginny to order more plasma from the blood bank and to notify the ICU that Bane would be leaving the OR intubated and sedated still.

Karl’s mind and hands worked together to methodically examine the aortic arch for deficiencies and determine his next cardiac course of action. Ginny dialed the blood bank and spoke with a controlled and deliberate manner as she watched the unstable spikes and valleys of Bane’s heart rate.

“Goddamn it,” Karl muttered lowly as Bane’s heart failed to respond to the bolus that Eric had injected. 

“Paddles,” he said as he held out his hand and Alana pressed the metal cardiac defibrillator paddles into his palm. 

Karl applied the paddles while Ginny adjusted the dial for delivering the charge. Karl applied the metal discs of the paddles against Bane’s quivering heart and called out an all clear before he delivered the volts to the spasming heart tissue. 

Bane’s heart lurched and Karl delivered a second shock after no immediate improvement. 

“Come on,” he said to Bane’s vacillating heart, “give me something to work with,” he said as he delivered a third charge. 

The smell of singed flesh emitted from Bane’s chest and floated around the surgical team, assaulting their nasal passages. 

Bane’s body had been slow to respond to the pushed medication but soon his vessels dilated, and his heart fell into a better rhythm. 

Karl blew out a relieved sigh and continued repairing the damaged valve. 

The tension in the suite settled down and soon the silly music flooded the sound system.

Outside the suite, watching through the plexi-glass window, Gordon ended a call with the Governor who was passing on a message from the President.

Gotham City’s citizens were afraid and wanted answers. The President authorized an emergency executive action to have Bane brought up on federal terrorism charges. 

A death sentence was essentially all but carried out. 

Blake’s fury exploded when Gordon told him how after Bane recovered, he’d be transferred temporarily to Black Gate before being transferred to D.C. 

“No, that’s bullshit, he needs to be tried here,” Blake spit and dropped a hand to his gun. “I’m going to give you your due fucking process right now,” he growled and went for the closed surgical doors of the suite.

“Take his badge and firearm,” Gordon ordered to two officers who were standing nearby.

Blake settled down enough to not get himself into further trouble.

“I don’t want to see your face for two weeks, in fact, you’re not to leave your house for two weeks,” Gordon said and turned his attention to the taller of the officers. 

“Drive him home and take his keys,” he ordered.

Blake glared at Gordon but let the officer’s escort him from the hospital and drive him home. 

After the officer’s left, ensuring they took his keys, Blake pulled a half-full bottle of scotch from the cabinet above the stove and took three large, swallows. The alcohol burning a path down his throat and spreading warmth throughout his chest and belly. 

As Blake drank, seethed, and continued to drink, outside the surgical suite, Gordon watched Bane’s chest sewn closed. 

As a line of staples was placed in a neat row down Bane’s muscular chest, hours and hours away, Bruce Wayne was having the knife wound Talia inflicted cleaned out and stitched shut by a surgeon for even the most reclusive billionaires and trolls who lived under bridges with enough money and connections. 

He grunted as the pain killer began to wear off as the surgeon finished a row of neat stitches. 

Bruce laid back on the exam table and swallowed two large green capsules and chased it with some high-end bottled water. 

He closed his eyes, feeling elated and confident that he had saved the city and future generations of Gothamites.

He was unsure of the exact fates of Talia and Bane but assumed if not unequivocally fatal, awfully close to it. 

Bruce smiled and took another sip of his highfalutin water and glanced at a crystal clock on the mantle. 

Ms. Selina Kyle would be arriving within eight hours if all went well. 

Bruce was eager to begin the life Alfred had described for him.

He settled back under the high thread count linen as back in Gotham, Bane was wheeled from the surgical suite and directly to the Intensive Care Unit. 

The team of ICU nurses and techs swarmed Bane’s sedated and post-surgical form as the respiratory technician hooked up his breathing tube and ensured proper air flow to his damaged lungs. 

Gordon watched from the doorway as the medical team situated Bane and rolled the surgical gurney from the room. He listened as the nurses mumbled to each other as they reviewed the doctor’s scribbled care plan.

One of the nurses turned to Gordon, her glasses perched low on her nose which boasted grossly enlarged pores. “Are the cuffs necessary?”

“I’m afraid so ma’am,” he answered courteously.

The nurse shook her head, clearly not viewing Bane as a threat in his neutered state.

Behind his closed eyes as the surgical drugs began to ebb away and leave his conscious mind exposed and assaulted by the mental and physical trauma, Bane listened to Gordon’s interactions with the nurse. 

Bane wanted to cough and yank the rigid breathing tube from his throat, his midsection felt like it was in a million pieces and each breath felt like he was inhaling the sulfurous smoke from an active volcano. 

He felt the nurse’s strong fingertips move across his chest and apply plastic pads to monitor his heart activity and slipped a Velcro cuff around his strong biceps to measure his blood pressure.

The nurse spoke steadily to his seemingly unconscious form. 

“My name is Jenifer and you’re at Gotham General.”

Bane listened and kept his expression completely neutral as she spoke to him in a low, soothing tone, explaining each touch of her hands.

Bane fought a chuckle as the nurse addressed Gordon.

“Some privacy would be appreciated; I can assure you that he’s not going anywhere like this.”

Gordon thought about pushing but had a feeling Jenifer was not one to be trifled with and he was really tired. 

Gordon ended up nodding at her and instructing the two officers to remain at both the entrance and exit of the ICU and not let Bane out of their sight.

Bane listened to the squeak of Gordon’s departing shoes as Jenifer filled a plastic basin with hot water. She rubbed a bar of unscented soap on a washcloth and cleaned off the caked blood that stained Bane’s knuckles and had become jammed under his fingernails. 

Bane’s mouth was coated in the coppery, metallic wash of blood from multiple lacerations. His nose burned with the sharp antiseptic smell of the ICU room. His exhale held the taste of the surgical gases that had allowed for his chest to be opened to the world and his heart handled by another. 

Bane heard Jenifer tearing open a few plastic packages and soon felt a haziness encroach on the scant amount of consciousness he possessed. The dull wave that washed over him reminded him of the blue flowers that grew on the Himalayan face.

Jenifer noted the administration of the opiate in her handcuffed patient’s chart and moved on to the patient next door. Bane’s ICU neighbor had been in a head-on collision and had shattered his pelvis. He was recovering following an eight-hour operation.

Bane slipped into unconsciousness as he heard the patient next door ask what was on the dinner menu.


	2. Likely No Suffering

As Bane’s broken body began the very first process of mending itself, Selina Kyle settled into the plush seat on Bruce’s private jet. 

She looked out the window at the tarmac, her thoughts bloated with overconfidence, her ego shamelessly masturbating, ejaculating narcissism. 

Selina adjusted her DVF dress that she had paired with a pair of dramatically high lemon-yellow stilettos and asked the flight attendant for an extra-dirty, olive-laden   
martini. 

As Selina took a long sip from the cut crystal glass, her lips leaving a crimson stain on the rim, in his studio apartment, Blake stared at his flat screen television, not paying attention to the basketball game. 

His mind roared like a caged lion, his thoughts congested as he wished he had been quick enough and put a bullet in Bane’s brain. 

“Fuck,” he shouted and kicked over his coffee table, his beer bottle falling to the floor and sloshing the lager on his threadbare carpet.

As Blake paced his living room, his anger growing by the second, Bruce’s multimillion-dollar private jet taxied to the runway and prepared to deliver Selina to Bruce’s current tropical location and his rich tanning oil glistening embrace. 

As Jenifer noted Bane’s oxygen saturation levels on his chart, in a Swiss mountain chalet, an eccentric man with more money than the suave Bruce Wayne, a man who likened himself to the creative and physical embodiment of Andy Warhol and Bowie during his reign as Ziggy Stardust paced his living room as the nuclear detonation over the water in Gotham City had made the news halfway around the world. 

Bryce Langdon slipped his lime-green, gold-wired glasses to the tip of his nose and leaned close to the polished clear glass of one of his many display cases. His collection had been amassed with the assistance of anonymous contract workers who navigated the dark web.

Bryce often had to search the darkness for pockets of necrotic lifeforms that barely passed as humans, possessing no moral compass, soul or thought for anything more than obscene amounts of money for copiously spilled blood and death. 

He looked up at a massive wall that was painted a stark white and completely bare except for Munch’s stolen “Scream,” that Bryce had liberated from Paris with the help of a man who dressed in three-piece suits and carried a pocket watch that could’ve been straight out of “Gift of the Magi.”

Bryce watched the stunning bottle-blonde news correspondent summarize POTUS speaking from the Rose Garden and condemning the actions of Bane and posthumously labeling Talia as a murderess, terrorist, and vaguely veiled condemnation of her character by inferring she was also a nasty whore. 

Bryce took his eyes off his most recent acquisition when the blonde with the piercing eyes seemed to lock eyes with him from the news station in New York as she continued to explain that POTUS had authorized Bane to be federally fast-tracked through the justice system and elevated the charges to domestic terrorism. 

Bryce tuned out the talking heads after the blonde briefly mentioned that Bane was currently recovering in Mercy Hospital in Gotham City and upon recovery would be transported to Black Gate Prison before being transported south to face charges in D.C.

It was an election year and POTUS wanted to show that the administration would not tolerate terrorism on the republic’s soil.

Bryce dropped his gaze back to the purple crushed velvet that his newest collectible rested upon. He glanced over at an empty glass case with a mannequin’s plastic forearm. The rigid hand’s fingers were bare, and Bryce wanted the fourth finger adorned with a ring. 

There was a ring he had been lusting after for decades, a jeweled encrusted band that was worn by a little girl that according to her murderers, “refused to die,” on July 17th, 1918. 

One of the youngest daughters in the Imperial Romanov Dynasty, Anastasia, whose life had been stripped from her body with barbaric brute force, had died with several pounds of jewelry hidden amongst the bountiful folds of her satin gown and adorned on her little body. 

The ring that had been removed from her finger as she cried out in death throes as her life’s blood continued to drain from multiple gun shots and bayonets stab wounds was going to be sold to another dark web browser that seemed to have more money than Bryce.

Bryce had reached out to his dark web contact who had first teased him with the multi-million-dollar ring, Anastasia’s blood still stuck in the platinum tines holding the large diamonds in place. 

He had heard back from his elusive contact that the ring was going to be held at a high-end jewelry store that boasted a vault for its more eccentric customers with particular needs. 

Bryce turned sharply towards the tv as his brain birthed an idea, his elbow bumped the display case and from inside the air and temperature controlled case,   
Napoleon’s desiccated penis lay still, dry and flaccid, ejaculating dust as Bryce fumbled for his phone and dialed his personal assistant.

As the ten times over billionaire waited for his call to connect, back in the hospital situated in the heart of Gotham City, Bane longed to stretch his back and neck, the muscles angry from only being shifted every two hours, unused lactic acid settling into his joints and causing an ache that throbbed with each beat of his healing heart.   
Bane let his eyes crack open when he detected no footfalls or busy hands restocking the medical cart in his ICU room. 

The grey ceiling led to painted off-white walls with a cheery bright blue border that displayed whales and fat orange fish swimming in tandem. 

He found he couldn’t move his head much and at a glance down the length of his hospital gowned body, found too many different wires and IV tubing leading to a plethora of medical devices. 

Bane tried to flex his hands; the small movement made the metal hand cuffs give a low, metallic jingle. He froze, already assessing his strict limitations in regard to movement. 

He felt a cough threaten around the endotracheal tube and attempted to still his thoughts, repelling the threatening surge of anxiety and panic at his situation. 

He redirected his thoughts to the pressure in his chest, the skin felt pulled too tight and he wished he could yank the gown free to see the state of his body. His senses were still assaulted by the acrid test of the residual anesthetic gases and the high artificial lemon taste of the moistening balm the nurses continually spread on his lips to prevent cracking and skin irritation.

Bane let his eyes fall closed again, reliving the moment that Selina Kyle shot the cannon into his chest. 

He wanted to squeeze his hands into fists, but the cuffs and IV lines prevented that as his mind replayed the projectile approaching him in slow-motion, unable to stop it from slamming into his chest and making him crumble to the ground, vulnerable and broken like a bird fallen from its nest, naked, featherless and exposed to the elements. 

He felt reduced to fodder for any predator, carrion for any bird of prey to feast upon on the side of the road. Bane felt as though he had been trapped in a glass jar and was now part of a traveling sideshow circus.

He was Houdini’s abortion, on display for the masses to gawk and point at.

“Where’s Talia?” his mind screamed, and he fought a groan as his body reacted poorly to him tensing his musculature that was still present despite his hobbled state. 

Bane longed to break out of the cuffs, rip the tube free of his throat and stalk room to room, questioning everyone who could speak until he could find Talia.

“Is she still living?” Bane asked himself as he let himself fall still as Jenifer returned before the end of her shift to check his vitals and push his evening opiate. 

As the drug grabbed ahold of Bane’s central nervous system and forced him into submission, down in the basement of the same hospital, the medical examiner finished his autopsy of Talia and noted his verbal report for later transcription. 

He mumbled under his breath as the morgue tech bagged up Talia’s crudely put back together body and prepared her for transport to the closest funeral home. No one had claimed her body and she would be cremated by the state and buried in Potter’s Field with a numerical assignment, nothing to mark her life or there to witness her forever internment. 

“Severed spinal column…...fractured pelvis……bilateral femur fractures…...C1-C7 spiral fracture,” the medical examiner said before pausing to take a healthful forkful of his Chinese chicken salad with large sesame seed stick, drowned in a creamy dressing. He speared a large piece of moist chicken breast before continuing his report.

“Multiple organ system failures…….perforated colon…...right enucleation.” 

As the medical examiner finished his report as well as every last leaf of dressing-drenched lettuce, back in the glorious chalet, picturesque in nature, Bryce’s personal assistant picked up on the third ring.

“Yes sir?”

“Campbell, what do you know about this Bane fellow?”

“Not much sir, what are you seeking?”

“I think he might be the right one for a little job, I want you to arrange for his prison transfer to get disrupted.”

“That should be easy to arrange sir, Yevgeni and Niemi are usually available at short notice.”

Gotham City started the long process of healing as the victims of Bane’s violence were laid to rest, construction began on fallen buildings and destroyed structures. 

Statues of some of the City’s fallen heroes were erected and parades were held near daily between the celebration of Gotham’s police force and resilience of the persevering Gothamites.

Blake stewed while on his two-week suspension. He longed to be at the bedside when varying governmental agencies began to stream in and question Bane.

He wanted his own questions answered, he wanted to levy judgement and carry out sentencing.

In the ICU room, Bane’s breathing had steadily improved and finally the day arrived that he would be able to have his uncomfortable endotracheal tube removed. The surgeon was confident he would be able to breathe on his own, but the crash cart was right at the end of the bed in case his lungs failed. 

The respiratory tech deflated the tube’s balloon and pulled the saliva covered plastic from Bane’s throat.

The room was quiet as everyone waited to see if he would be able to breathe on his own.

Bane coughed sharply, the respiratory tech was on the spot with the portable suction tube and cleared the phlegm from his mouth. 

He took a few ragged breaths, his chest burning. The surgeon leaned over in order for his face to be in Bane’s field of vision. 

“How are you feeling son?”

The surgeon had decades under his belt and had dealt with every kind of patient. He had opened the chests of men with swastikas tattoos and other permanent symbols of hate as well as repaired the mitral valves of rapists and other criminal deviants. 

Dr. Karl Sellane looked at Bane as he did every other patient, one of the few remaining salt of the earth men that took their Hippocratic Oath with the utmost seriousness.

Bane opened his eyes and held the surgeon’s gaze. He couldn’t find deceit in the bright blue orbs and nodded his chin in a barely perceptible fashion.

Karl laid a hand on Bane’s muscled shoulder cap and squeezed firmly as he spoke lowly. 

“I’m not going to paint a rosy picture for you son. You were severely injured and have a long recovery process in front of you.”

Bane listened unblinking as the surgeon detailed the surgery he had performed as well as what kind of expectations Bane could expect from his body after the near-fatal injury.

Karl dropped his voice even lower as he added. “There is a line of people waiting to talk to you in the hallway. If it becomes overwhelming, press this button,” he mumbled and ensured Bane had the nurse’s call button in his handcuffed grip.

Bane nodded his appreciation at the nonjudgement from the healer. 

Karl glanced up at the clock, he had eleven minutes before he needed to scrub in for a routine pacemaker implant. 

It would be just enough time to eat a protein bar and choke it all down on whatever coffee remained in the doctor’s lounge before taking a camel-sized piss. 

Karl turned to leave when Bane’s strangled whisper reached his ear.

“Doctor?”

“Yes?”

Bane let feeling leech into his eyes as he spoke lowly.

“Is she gone?”

Karl held Bane’s eyes for a pregnant pause before slowly nodding.

“I saw the report, she most likely didn’t suffer.”

Bane pillow-smothered his grief inside his frontal lobe and nodded before he closed his eyes; he was through speaking for a while.


	3. Blue-Collar Patriots and Good Ole' Fashioned Rage

The billionaire Bryce Langdon’s personal assistant Addison Campbell searched through a mess of random numbers he’d amassed over the years in service to Bryce.

He muttered under his breath in a sharp foreign language, so different from his French-touched spoken syllables over the phone. 

He knew he had some information on the alleged bidder of the bejeweled and nearly priceless ring that Bryce lusted over.

Campbell gave a joyful grunt as he found a long phone number on a bright blue cocktail napkin emblazoned with the logo of a hedonistic hotel for rich men with unlimited bankrolls and dick-enhancing drugs.

As the crackly call connected to a man that lived in a shitty shack in South America, who had millions stuffed in a dirty pillowcase, but still openly pissed in the street and wiped his ass with wet banana leaves, the valuable antiquity, whose original royal owner had been murdered nearly a century before, sat still and quiet in a velvet-lined vault drawer with a double-locked key entry.

The titanium sphere that boasted a glorious pear-shaped diamond sat coldly in the dark. 

The ring was first placed on the finger of the young Anastasia at her coronation in May 1911.

Anastasia was a small child the day her finger boasted the now over millions plus appraised ring.

She had refused to eat her breakfast that morning and tossed her gilded goblet of goat’s milk onto the unforgiving floor. Her mother had bribed her with a ride on her favorite horse through the countryside if she’d put on the pastel gown that made her look like a little, lilac Easter egg. 

Her young life as a royal passed by without much incident until her short life was ended in a hail of first gun shots, fire, potential smoke asphyxiation and eventually bayonet stab wounds that led to complete and utter exsanguination. 

On July 17th, 1918, the ring was removed from her dead finger. The valuable jewels that once pulsed around her living resilient flesh, now lay cool and lifeless, waiting for the bidding war winner to claim victor and capture her as a spoil of war.

As the ring, which went from Anastasia’s freshly dead finger after being pulled from the smoke-filled barn to being lost, mishandled, bought, and sold over the following century, waited in the dark drawer, back in the ICU room at the heart of Gotham, Bane was having his blood pressure cuff readjusted after three reading value errors. 

Jenifer blew out a sharp breath and glanced at the clock, she was behind seeing her other patients because of the insanely difficult urinary catheter placement to Bane’s ICU neighbor.

Bane was fully awake behind his closed eyes and took measured, even breaths. Even his most respiratory deception did not mislead Jenifer in the slightest. She smirked as she moved the cuff to his other heavily muscled arm and waited for the values to be displayed on the screen, glancing down at his artfully feigned sleep. 

She looked over her shoulder when Gordon rapped on the door frame, a group of serious men standing behind him. All were issued service weapons, badges, and a license to get answers regardless if the words didn’t want to be spoken. 

“I’d pretend to be asleep too,” Jenifer whispered and recorded Bane’s slightly elevated blood pressure before leaving the men to surround Bane’s hospital bed. 

As the first set of men from a veritable laundry list of governmental agencies known by three letters stared down at Bane, across the city, Blake dug a post-hole for his backyard fence, he drank as much beer as he sweat out under the heavy work. He had been finding projects to throw his excess energy into and had already patched the roof, dry-walled the attic and painted the exterior of the house. 

As Blake leaned heavily on a stack of redwood planks, in the ICU room, Bane cracked open his eyes as a short man with an even shorter penis and anger that surely was derived from Hades Himself, shouted down into his face.

The blue-collar patriot had dropped his amiable façade as soon as Gordon had reluctantly given him and the others some privacy. 

Officer, William “Billy” Curtis sprayed Bane’s face with spit as he shouted rapid-fire questions in-between threats he didn’t even bother to veil. 

“There’s no fucking future for you, you’re never going to make it to D.C.”

Bane let his eyes open completely, the onyx black pupils of his hazelnut orbs dilated as the looming officer’s face came into focus.

He slowly smiled, knowing the officer’s actions were tied by the laws of man. 

“Spew your adolescent blather elsewhere, you don’t have permission to walk in my shadow, let alone speak to me,” Bane growled.

Curtis’s face turned as red as a Bing cherry as his emasculated hackles rose.

The other officer who had not yet spoken yet, dropped his hand and pinched the soft skin over Bane’s Achilles heel, digging his thumb into his flesh as he spoke lowly. 

His words emitted through thin lips surrounded with wrinkles due to his two-pack a day cigarette habit, his yellow teeth glowed wanly under the fluorescent lighting. 

“I was there when they pulled your broken bitch from the truck, she shit her pants, smelled real fucking ripe.”

The officer grinned when Bane clenched his hands into fists, the handcuff bracelets tinkling musically. 

The first officer poked his fingers into Bane’s chest as he whispered lowly. “I was hoping to find her alive, I would’ve interrogated her with an all-American meat baton until she was gagging for more.” 

Bane’s expression bled to neutrality and his eyes memorized the two men, committed their faces to an indelible list of people he would hunt down and kill given the soonest opportunity. 

“What’s going on in here?” Gordon yelled as he returned with shitty cafeteria coffee and saw officer Curtis poking Bane’s chest.

Curtis turned towards Gordon, a pleasant lift to his lips, “just talking,” he mumbled and nodded at his quiet partner. “We’re done here, for now.”

Gordon watched the two men leave; unease gnawed at his gut as he glanced back at Bane after the armed sadists disappeared into the elevator. 

Bane had closed his eyes, his nostrils flared as he tried to control his breathing. 

The medical equipment displayed how he was really feeling inside, Gordon watched the green digital numbers on the machines register increases to his blood pressure, pulse, and respiration. 

“Those men have no honor son, I’ll be addressing their superior,” Gordon murmured lowly as he stared down at Bane’s handcuffed form.

Bane cracked open his eyes and met Gordon’s gaze, he opened his mouth to speak but was interrupted by Jenifer and a tech as they came rushing into the room at the sound of the machine’s alarm.

“Did you do something?” Jenifer accusingly asked Gordon.

“No, he was just questioned.”

“Oh, you mean by those twisted officers from D.C.?”

“You’re familiar with them?” Gordon asked as Jenifer and the tech adjusted Bane’s IV flow and pushed stabilizing medications. 

Jenifer snorted, speaking with her eyes never leaving Bane’s heart monitor. “That Steel Lane bomber Erik Lang a few years ago, he was here a few days before getting sent to Arkham. Those two men talked with him too and after they left, Lang died. On autopsy, his head was found to be cracked from blunt force trauma.”

Gordon nodded, he remembered the case well and the unexplained murder. 

“Look, I try not to interfere with your ‘police business,’ but I really can’t have any more of this male bravado horseshit. It’s loud enough with our ‘celebrity,’ patient here,” Jenifer spit.

Gordon felt the protective passion emanate from her in waves and for a second forgot he was married and would’ve flown into the sun just to kiss her. He blinked hard and raised his hands. “I’m sorry for their distraction, I will post more officers and contact the Governor. I’ll explain the disruption, I know they want him in D.C. as soon as possible.”

Jenifer nodded and offered a tired smile. “Fine, thank you, but I really need you to leave now. I need to change his bandages.”

“Can I have five minutes, please, just five and I’ll get out of your hair.”

Jenifer nearly rolled her eyes, “you can have three.”

Gordon watched her leave and walk into a patient’s room across the hall before he turned to Bane. He was surprised to find Bane’s eyes open and already on him. 

Gordon settled his hands in his coat pockets and cleared his throat. 

“I’m being sent directly to D.C.?”

Gordon was surprised at the musical quality remaining in Bane’s damaged vocal cords and crudely repaired larynx. 

“Yes,” he said with a nod. “It’s an election year for both POTUS and the Governor. Their plan is a hardline on crime, your plan was ill-timed.”

Bane didn’t detect judgement or condemnation, just fact. He nodded slightly, his neck muscles aching and the inability to stretch his arms overhead. 

“I’ll be given the gas chamber?”

“It’s all about assured,” Gordon said with a nod, “it’s an election year.”

“When will the transfer take place?”

“Most likely three weeks from now according to the surgeon, you don’t leave this hospital until he signs off on it.”

“I need to be healthy enough to execute?”

“Yes, otherwise it’d be a violation of your constitutional rights,” Gordon said with a sad shake of his head. “I’m going to do everything I can to ensure there’s no more visitors,” Gordon added, knowing there wasn’t much he could do. 

Bane was still a mass murderer.

“Thank you, Commissioner,” Bane said and let his eyes fall closed.

As Bane’s three-week transfer passed, his body continued to heal but he refused any further conversation with anyone. 

Gordon was able to convince the Governor that he’d have plenty of news clips later, but those patients and their families were still potential voters. 

As the time passed, Blake’s anger only grew, he felt cock-blocked, ball-gagged and neutered without his badge and legal ability to get his own answers from Bane. He was furious D.C. was going to get to take Bane’s life. During the three weeks until Bane’s transfer, Blake continued working on his home, rebuilt his Mustang’s engine and even poured a new concrete driveway. 

Two days before the transfer, Dr. Karl Selanne did one last exam and signed Bane as being healthy enough to drive south and be asphyxiated for votes. As Karl moved to his next post-operative patient, the assistant to the billionaire Bryce Langdon pulled his luxury sedan to a stop in front of the hospital and walked briskly to the ICU.  
His charisma made the receptionist nod him in the direction of Bane’s room when he introduced himself as Bane’s legal counsel.

Some luck was with him though, Jenifer was on her lunch break and he evaded her detection. 

Addison Campbell adjusted his silk tie and walked through the doorway of Bane’s room.

Bane narrowed his eyes as Addison approached, his nose assaulted by his pungent cologne, assessing him as whether he was prey worth speaking to.   
Addison gave a small smile as he met Bane’s eyes. 

“Good afternoon, I won’t waste your time. My name is Addison Campbell and I am employed by a man that would see you liberated from this establishment in exchange for you flexing your muscles again.”

Bane shifted as much as the handcuffs would allow as he let Addison’s words marinate in his frontal lobe, careful to keep his expression neutral.

“Freedom from this place?”

“Secure and guaranteed freedom for a simple task.”

“How can you guarantee such a thing?”

“I assume you’ve heard of the …... elusive clean slate?”

Bane couldn’t fail to show he very much knew what the clean slate could mean.

“What’s the task?”

Addison opened his briefcase and withdrew a stack of papers that detailed the blueprints and footprint of the high-end jewelry store where Anastasia Romanov’s ring waited to be picked up by its new buyer. 

Bane squinted and scanned the papers Addison held up one at a time as he explained that the ring was going to only be there for a short window of time, a window that coincided with Bane’s armored transport to the federal penitentiary in D.C. 

Bane let his eyes drink in the last known image of the ring on the freshly dead Anastasia’s finger. The heavily jeweled ring was now his key to freedom.

Addison lowered his voice as he shuffled the papers and closed his briefcase. “The transfer is scheduled with the feds for the day after tomorrow. However tomorrow, another transport team will arrive and a call from the Governor will be received here and you will be one step closer to freedom and anonymity.” 

Addison detailed the two men that he would be working with, Alexis Larionov and Miquel Ricci. 

He outlined how he would have the two well-paid men as the prison driver and transport, then, simply deactivate the GPS and slip away to a safe house until they could converge upon the jewelry store. 

“I will meet you and the others at the safe house twenty-four hours after you’ve retrieved the ring, anything else you want in the vault is free for the picking. I will deliver the clean slate when I pick up the ring. Do you have any questions?”


	4. No More Fun

Bane’s last night in the hospital passed slowly. 

He’d had no questions for Addison and now counted off the minutes until his freedom.

The jewel heist didn’t sound terribly complicated. He and the other two paid dangerous men would need to head directly to the jewelry store after one small side trip. 

They needed to facilitate the high-risk, broad daylight robbery before the fraudulent prison transport was discovered. 

Jenifer would always remember the last time she saw Bane. She recorded his morning vitals and found everything elevated, his color was exceptional, it was like he was full of the sun, even his nail beds were flushed a healthy pink. 

Bane’s hope at freedom radiated from behind his closed eyelids and remained that way as Alexis Larionov and Miquel Ricci appeared at the ICU reception desk and flashed their badges and letter signed by the Governor.

Jenifer didn’t like it and called the number Alexis said was the Governor’s office.

The number actually belonged to the eccentric billionaire Bryce Langdon and he said all the right words and assured Jenifer enough that she didn’t think twice until she   
saw the Breaking News report after the high death count heist. 

Alexis and Miquel acted professional in their phony uniforms until they had Bane loaded into the Federal Penitentiary sturdy transport rig.

As soon as Alexis was a few miles out from the hospital he pulled into a planned spot at a self-storage complex. Alexis and Miquel efficiently released Bane from his restraints, and all abruptly exchanged introductions before loading into a nondescript paneled van. 

They secured the imposter transport truck in the storage unit and left at a law-abiding speed limit towards the heart of Gotham City and the exclusive jewelry store that dressed starlets on the red carpet for awards of hard golden men. 

On the drive, Bane and the two men went over the extensive blueprints and details about the high-end jewelry store’s alarm system and intricate vault. 

As the billionaire’s paid pet criminals headed downtown, across town Blake woke up in his usual angered state and decided to dig a big hole in the backyard and put in a koi pond.

Blake was knee deep in a hole as Bane, Alexis and Miguel parked the van and began the first stage of their frontal assault and actions that changed so many lives in less than fifteen minutes. 

Livia Anne James would never forget looking up at the clock when the three very obviously out-of-place among the delicate baubles, armed men entered the jewelry store. 

8:47.

She was standing behind one of many display cases, the glass polished until it sparkled under the overhead lights. She had just returned the register keys to Joseph Anderson, the morning manager of the high-end jewelry store, Aphrodite.

Joseph threw a protective arm around Livia’s shoulders as Bane moved towards them, flanked by the shorter, stockier Alexis and the whip-thin, tall Miquel, cursed with an atrocious complexion. 

Livia held her breath as her eyes moved rapidly over the trio of men who held certain threat. She looked up into the grave face of the heavily armed lead man. She tried not to stare but couldn’t stop her gaze from moving across him, absorbing every detail of his massive frame and daunting musculature. Livia locked eyes with him after she trailed her gaze over his strong jaw, curve of his cheekbones and was swallowed by the warm depths of his dark eyes. 

She noticed rigid scars that he must’ve worn for years based on their appearance. Addison hadn’t told Bane when he offered him freedom, but Langdon had pulled some major strings and called in big favors to people who knew where bodies were buried to get Bane’s mask from police custody. 

Bane had been pleased to find his mask among a bag of dark clothing and guns. The first breath of the analgesic over his frayed nervous system had made him cough until he nearly saw stars. 

Livia watched the intense gaze of the masked man slide from her to Joseph, he focused on the keys.

“Give me the keys,” he stated in a musically empty tone. Joseph fumbled with the keyring and passed it to the gunman. “There are alphanumeric codes you’ll need, please let everyone go and I’ll access everything.”

Joseph and Livia’s blood ran cold as the man gave a menacing chuckle, “your keys will be quite sufficient. Both of you sit down and put your hands-on top of your head.”

Bane took a deep breath of his pain-killing inhalant and nearly forgot anyone else was in the room besides the young woman frozen in fear. He clenched his teeth until his jaw popped as he continued to stare. 

The moment he laid eyes upon her, he had no idea that inside him, his very genetic code was unraveling. The severed strands reached for hers. Livia’s fear reached inside him and met his secreted grief, found his private mourning and unshed pain. 

They both followed orders as the masked man addressed the room. “I’m going to say this just once, still your minds and listen carefully. All of you will stand in an orderly, upright fashion and walk in silence to the vault. Once there you will hand over any personal effects. If you stray from these simple instructions, you will be killed where you stand.” 

Bane looked over the sea of frightened faces, the sniper specialist Alexis was standing to the right of the room and kept his eyes constantly moving over the crowd, as Miguel, the demolitions expert was moving through the building, checking closets and offices for anyone trying to hide. 

Livia scooted away from Joseph a centimeter at a time.

“What’re you doing?” Joseph hissed under his breath. 

“I’m going to hit the silent alarm under the desk,” she whispered back. 

“Stop, you’re going to get yourself killed.”

Livia ignored him; she was close to the beige button under the desk. She was so focused on keeping her eyes on the taller man that she completely missed the   
speaking leader watch her depress the small button. 

Bane began moving back to where she was kneeling next to Joseph when Alexis gave an agitated shout. 

“Goddammit, police call just went out, silent alarm, we’ve got seven minutes max.”

Bane nodded and reached Livia right after Miguel charged up to the glass case they were huddled behind. 

“Did you push that fucking alarm?” Miguel barked at her. 

Livia froze as the tall man raised an automatic handgun and pointed it at the center of her forehead. 

She immediately felt too warm and her world grew hazy around the edges as he continued to berate her with a litany of disparaging remarks.

She felt her bladder suddenly become too full. “I can’t believe I’m going to piss myself and then get shot,” she thought and caught the presumed leader of the deadly trio march back into her line of sight. 

“It wasn’t her Miguel,” Bane said and pushed the gun away from Livia’s face. 

Before she had a chance to take a breath or process, he lifted his own gun to Joseph’s face and pulled the trigger. Livia felt a scream crawl up her throat as her boss,   
co-worker and friend of four years toppled over, the back of his skull blown out by the close-range hollow point bullet. 

“It was that one, I saw him. Now expedite everyone into the vault.”

Miguel nodded satisfactorily and checked his firearm’s magazine before shouting to the hostages to pick up their feet. 

Livia watched the slim man walk away, following orders and was too frozen to even flinch when Bane grasped her upper arm none too gently and yanked her to her feet. 

She could barely find the strength to lift her limbs or resist as he pulled her to the rear of the store. Livia cast what would be her final look back at Joseph, his body lying in a puddle of still warm blood, chunks of grey matter splashed about randomly. 

Bane stopped dragging her when they got to the vault but kept his grip on her upper arm solidly in place as Miguel and Alexis started herding everyone inside the concrete lined vault whose heavy stainless-steel door stood proudly open.

Bane abruptly shoved Livia to the ground as one of the younger store clerks broke away from the group of shuffling hostages. Livia recognized him as Josh, a new hire from just the week before, his face was contorted with rage as he charged Bane. 

Livia felt acidic bile rise in her throat as Bane capitalized on Josh’s forward momentum and brought his knee sharply upwards and knocked the air clean from his lungs. Josh hit the ground and curled into the fetal position as Bane began pummeling him with sharp kicks to his side and then dropped to his knees, so he could drive his fists into every soft patch of flesh.

Livia broke her frozen vocal cords free, “stop,” she shouted, “he’s not fighting you anymore.” 

Bane stilled and met Livia’s frightened gaze. His chest heaved and sweat stood out on his creased brow. His knuckles were split and covered in Josh’s dying blood. “You think he’s had enough?” Bane asked and Livia nodded slowly. 

She kept nodding when he added in an empty tone, “you’d like me to stop?”

Bane stared at her for a few wordless seconds and everything around her seemed to fall away, her breathe seized in her chest as he withdrew a matte black handgun. 

She didn’t have time to speak when he aimed the muzzle at Josh’s bleeding, shaking form and pulled the trigger in three rapid successions. 

“You’re right, that wasn’t fun anymore,” Bane growled and tucked the gun back into a thigh holster. 

Bane stalked into the vault which housed priceless jewels and items of antiquity for affluent customers without releasing Livia who struggled to keep up with his much longer stride. She watched him pause at safety deposit box number #528 and pull a set of keys from his pocket that were identical to the keys Joseph had handed over   
before his death. 

Livia watched him slide both keys in the lock and swing open the gilded rectangular door, it squeaked on its hinges as he tugged out the aluminum box and upended the contents. Livia watched a single legal-sized envelope fall to the floor, he quickly scooped the battered envelope from the floor and peeked inside it, seemingly pleased with the contents, he shoved the envelope into his pocket. Bane turned to Miguel, “make sure no one else is lingering about.” 

After everyone was inside the vault, Miguel ordered them to face the rear of the room and get on their knees, he looked over at Bane who was still holding Livia close. 

“Is she going in there too?” 

Bane didn’t look over at Livia, but she felt him tighten his fingers around her upper arm. “I’ve got a few more uses in mind for this one before disposal,” he growled as the three men shared a charged chuckle. 

Alexis helped Miguel pull the round vault door closed, right before the door closed and he engaged the first of four locking mechanisms, Alexis pushed a modified white phosphorus grenade into the vault.

As the quartet exited the room, the muffled explosion was barely heard as the grenade detonated and death came fast and furious to the living. 

Livia felt light-headed as she realized what they had done to her co-workers and customers that chose the wrong day to spend obscene amounts of money for diamond rings and overpriced jeweled baubles. 

She knew her arm would be heavily bruised as Bane tugged her to the front of the store.

If she had been able to, Livia would have looked at the clock again to forever assign the exact time to the hailstorm of bullets that were fired at them. 

Bane, Alexis, and Miguel had all missed the two police officers in a nearby franchise coffee house chain. The two officers, one a twenty-two-year veteran and the other on the force just under a year, unleashed a wave of ammunition. 

Bane shoved Livia behind a concrete planter that boasted a large palm tree and returned fire along with Alexis and Miguel. 

Alexis gave a shout that ended in a wet gurgle and tried to keep his gun in the air as he clapped his other hand on the fleshy wound the .45 caliber bullet had made when it pierced his neck. Miguel hit the veteran officer first in the large muscle of his thigh which made him drop to his knees and then followed up with three more rapid trigger pulls. Two of the bullets hit the officer in the mid-section and the third grazed his shoulder.

He ceased to live. 

Miguel yelled an expletive in Portuguese as the younger officer’s bullet buried itself deep in his abdomen. His liver received the brunt of the impact and began to spew profuse amounts of blood and bile into his abdominal cavity, the process of death began the nanosecond his belly was penetrated by the high-powered round. 

Livia crouched behind the planter and tried to make herself as small as possible. She sobbed and covered her ears as the sound of gunfire threatened to make her deaf. She didn’t see whose bullets killed who, she missed Bane firing at the young officer and delivering death via head shot for the second time that day. 

Bane looked over as Miguel mostly supported Alexis’s weight as he sagged in his arms, his neck bleeding profusely while Miguel’s gut grew numb as it filled with fluid, his face began to drain of color and blood. 

“We’re going to the safe house,” Bane said loud enough for Miguel to hear and began to stagger towards the door with Alexis who was hemorrhaging. 

Bane pulled Livia to her trembling feet, he gripped her upper arm and yanked her impossibly close and pressed his masked lips against her ear. “Don’t be afraid, this’ll be over soon,” he whispered as he dragged her to the white paneled van and shoved her in the back after efficiently securing her wrists in handcuffs, she was closely followed by the two bleeding men. 

Bane climbed into the driver’s seat and was on the freeway seventy-four seconds before police and SWAT arrived on the scene to the jewelry store massacre and multi-million-dollar heist.

Livia felt her whole world collapse as the van picked up speed and she was jostled alongside the two murderers who were bleeding on every surface including her. She felt a gag rise in her throat as the shorter man with the neck wound went into a seizure and poured forth a fresh spout of arterial blood onto her left foot before he stopped living. 

She tried to ignore the other bleeding man, but he was soon making a high keening noise and breathing erratically against the back of her head before he also fell silent. 

Bane drove the van with the flow of traffic and continued for what seemed like hours to Livia as she laid nestled in-between the cooling blood-soaked corpses. She passed out at some point from the sheer mental overload and snapped awake when Bane’s rough hands yanked her upright and settled her over one of his massive shoulders. Livia didn’t have the wherewithal to struggle much and was quickly settled on hard-packed ground and leaned back against a tall oak tree. 

Livia watched with rapt attention as Bane began digging a deep hole. “He kept me from the vault, I would’ve burned to death,” she thought and shuddered. She forced thoughts of a fiery death from her mind as he dragged the two men’s recently living corpses to the hole and arranged them as neat as one could arrange fresh bodies past the grip of rigor mortis, sacks of meat. He poured several gallons of industrial lye on the bodies before tearing open a couple bags and dumping some pinkish powder on top of the marinating corpses before he began the process of filling in the hole.

Livia couldn’t ignore his obvious physique as he began to perspire from the exertion, she felt her eyes laser-focus on a drop of sweat form over his prominent temporal artery and slid down the shelf of his cheekbone. The plump salty drop smoothed down the vascular striation of his neck and soaked into the collar of his dark grey fitted thermal top, making the fabric darken at the collar.

When he was done, Bane wiped his face with a mostly clean rag from the van’s floor and walked briskly towards where Livia was leaning against the tree trunk. Livia fruitlessly tried to scramble away from him, and he quickly scooped her up and carried her to the passenger seat of the van. She fell silent when he placed his fingertips against her lips. “Please calm yourself, I don’t want to have to remedy the situation for your silence.”

Livia sat rigidly in the passenger seat as he drove the van about a quarter of a mile to a large aluminum shed. He parked the van on the dirt floor and pulled her from the seat and set her on a grassy patch before turning his attention back to the van. Livia watched with marked curiosity as he doused every surface of the van with medical grade bleach. He turned his full attention to her after he closed and locked the shed doors. 

Livia felt her vision grow fuzzy around the edges as his eyes seemed to see inside of her. She didn’t know whether to scream, cry, run or expect to die. 

Bane felt it difficult to maintain the maniacal bravado and didn’t know what he would sound like or potentially say.

“Can you walk on your own?” he finally asked melodically.

Livia nodded; afraid her voice would fail if she tried to speak. She struggled to her feet and swayed a bit with the sudden movement. Bane slid an arm around her side and half-carried her to the house they had passed on the way to the shed. She looked around at the vast landscape, thick with trees and lush bushes as he unlocked the brick-colored door. 

He tugged her along with him into a cozy kitchen that was without much color or decoration. There wasn’t a bit of clutter to be seen as Bane led her to a plain wooden chair. She gratefully sat, her head aching and hating the sight of her blood covered left foot. He fumbled with the remote control and turned on a small flat screen television and flipped through the channels until he located a local news station. 

Livia cleared her throat nervously, “can you please take these handcuffs off, my hands are numb.” She held her breath as Bane slowly turned in her direction. She let out her breath slowly as he wordlessly freed her wrists and she felt immediate tingling as the blood came rushing back into her hands. She flexed her fingers as the Breaking News logo flashed onto the screen.

The platinum blonde news anchor stared down the camera as she described the bold robbery and incendiary explosion of the high-end jewelry store. The screen filled with Livia’s face as the anchor’s voice turned sympathetic as she described the horror of Livia’s broad-day abduction following the robbery and high death count.

Livia’s eyes widened as the news segment switched to a local law enforcement official who detailed the crimes of Bane and the deceased Alexis and Miguel. Bane glanced over as Livia covered her mouth to stifle a small gasp as the official listed off the dangerous trio’s previous robberies, kidnappings, and murder count. The camera returned to the blonde news woman as she again expressed concern for Livia being in the hands of a deranged sociopathic madman. 

When the station went to a commercial break, Livia let her eyes move from his feet up to meet his heavy gaze. 

Bane nodded in the direction of the television before speaking without remorse, “I’ve done everything they said, plus some.”


	5. Imagination

Livia nodded, trying to keep her breathing steady, “does that mean you’re going to kill me too?” She was almost proud of how little her voice quavered. 

Bane shook his head and spoke casually. “No, I have different plans for you, they require you to remain living.”

He watched her face as his words permeated her brain’s processing center. 

Bane’s expression was neutral as erratic thoughts bounced around his skull and rapidly multiplied. He tried to ignore them by letting his gaze drink her up. His eyes moved along her smooth skin, down her neck and lingered on the exposed skin of her décolletage before being distracted by the copious amounts of blood that had soaked into her clothing from being nestled between the bleeding bodies of the dead and buried men.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked as her mind tried to psychologically understand what was happening to her current plane of reality. 

Livia blinked her eyes a couple times rapidly at his question. “Kind of,” she admitted and added with a shrug. “I go to GU fulltime and work at the jewelry store part time, most of my spare time is sleeping or studying.” 

“Do you reside on the campus dormitories?”

Livia shook her head, her words sounding hollow as she spoke. “I live with my aunt and uncle.”

She jumped to her feet as he stepped away from the counter and towards her, speaking in the same casually musical tone. “You need to clean up.”

Bane smiled behind his mask at her belief in the perceived safety of the table between them as he stood at the other end of the rectangular wooden tabletop. 

“A liaison will be here tomorrow to retrieve the envelope, this is a temporary location,” he murmured melodically, his words designed to distract her and throw her further off balance. Passively unkind.

Livia squinted as her heart began to race in her chest, feeling light-headed from standing too fast. 

“What happens then?” 

“Most of that is up to you,” he murmured with musical vagueness and could see her pulse dancing under the smooth skin of her neck. His eyes dropped to her blood-stained blouse; sporadic patches dried to a deep eggplant shade. 

“What does that mean?” she managed, her eyes very much on him and any detected movement. 

Bane flattened his palms on the smooth grain of the tabletop before he spoke. “It means you need to make a choice, this will only go one of two ways,” he said simply.   
“What are these choices?” she managed without a stammer as he started to move around the table. She parroted his movements, continuing to leave the table between them. Regardless of how fast he made his movement, she was powered by fear and adrenaline and her steps were on point, her nervous system electric. 

“You’ll share your life with me,” Bane said and watched her eyes widen. He had lost his heart to her when his eyes found her beauty standing above the millions of dollars of diamonds and jewels sought after by kings and queens. She was Mount Olympus eclipsing the sun. 

“Or?” she asked as her rising anxiety began to slow her body’s adrenaline flow and fatigue replaced the energy. 

“Or I’ll take whatever you won’t freely give,” he said simply and gained distance around the table as her overwhelmed system was too slowed to both think and move simultaneously. 

Livia jumped back too quickly, bumping her hip against the edge of the Formica counter. She might’ve stumbled had he not caught her and pulled her into in his arms.  
“Let go of me,” she screeched as she found her second wind and came alive within the circle of his powerful embrace. 

“You’re insane,” Livia added shrilly and dropped to the floor and scrambled away from him. Bane was initially startled at her quick movement and pivoted in an even quicker fashion, grabbing her ankle as she tried to rise from her crawl across the rustic wood floor.

Livia screamed when his hand closed firmly around her ankle and she felt herself pulled backwards. She kicked her unrestrained foot towards him and thumped his shoulder, she drew her foot back again to kick and he yanked hard on her captured ankle, the floor rushed up to meet her. She blinked back tears as her nose hit the floor with a healthy smack. 

Bane felt his heartless façade slip as concern flooded him, the foreign feeling engulfed him and forced words from his mouth. “Are you okay?” he asked as he released her ankle and extended a hand to help her to her feet. Livia half-turned, blood running in slow warm rivulets from both nostrils. 

“What’re you? A psychopath with a fucking heart?” she sneered and scooted a couple feet further from him as he rose to his full height and closed the distance between them with two long strides.

“No, that’s not what I am,” he stated with zero inflection to his voice, his face expressionless as he held his hand down towards her.

“What are you then?” she asked and stared at his hand, the blunt fingernails, and jagged cuticles. 

“Give me your hand,” he growled musically, ignoring her words.

“You want so much,” she stated breathlessly and continued staring at his outstretched hand.

“I can and will provide for you, anything you want or need. I have the resources to follow through on that promise,” he murmured as he silently urged her to meet his eyes. He deeply inhaled his analgesic inhalant and let the cheap thrill of the initial high enhance his excitement as she processed his words. 

Livia took a sharp breath in as he added. “I want you to be my wife.”

“And we’d have a real marriage?” 

“Yes,” Bane stated on an easy musical clipped syllable. “A real marriage, followed by a real-life together.”

“I don’t understand how you can talk about something like that,” she said as she shook her head and scooted away from him rapidly as he began walking towards her. 

The entire squad of Livia’s inner cheerleaders all gave war cries as she was able to scramble to her feet and put her hands out defensively but still continued to back up, glancing over her shoulder, trying to judge how far away the front door was. 

Bane watched her eyes dart to the door and started towards her as she made a sudden dash to his left and grabbed the fireplace poker from the chrome-colored set by the brick hearth. 

Livia raised the poker in her best imitation of a professional baseball player which was difficult in her mentally fatigued state and blood-soaked clothing. 

“Are you going to hit me with that?”

“That’s the plan,” she stated simply.

Bane paused in his movements and reconsidered his response as she continued. “I’m really sorry I don’t know who you are but thank you for not killing me in the vault. But this stuff you’re saying is really confusing and I can’t stay with you, let alone marry you,” she said with a nervous chuckle.

“Why exactly is that?”

“Because,” she scoffed. “We don’t even know each other; you can’t marry someone whose name you don’t even know.”

“Your name is Livia James,” he stated on a gentle melodical tone. 

Livia felt a flash of irritation that Bane saw spark in her sea-green eyes, the spark caused a hot coil to twist in his groin as she spit. “Just because you read my name tag, doesn’t mean you know me. You can’t marry someone you don’t know.”

“We have nothing but time to get to know each other,” Bane replied.

“That’s not the way it works, you get to know someone first,” she said and tightened her grip on the metal handle as he shifted his weight, his knee popping from the lateral movement. 

“Put that down,” he ordered in a low tone.

Livia shook her head and choked up on the handle, her mouth suddenly too dry.

She began to move back and to the side, closing the distance to the front door. She frowned seeing the dead bolt and one extra lock to navigate.

Bane saw how her movements telegraphed a path to the front door. 

“It would be unwise of you to attempt anything further,” he warned musically and watched her blink rapidly, processing his words.

Bane debated charging her and tackling her to the ground, he wasn’t seeming to reach her with his words. He was beginning to have a hard time concentrating, afraid of hurting her while subduing her, the weight of the handcuffs was present in his back pants pocket. 

Livia’s eyes darted one more time between the door and his hulking frame before counting backwards from three, gritting her teeth and making a coked out erratically energetic beeline towards the closest exit. 

“No,” his mind raged as he cut her off and narrowly avoided her wild swing of the wickedly sharp poker and wrapped her up in his arms and brought them both heavily to the ground.

Bane cradled her body and absorbed most of the blunt force, but the breath was still knocked from her lungs. Livia coughed as Bane shifted her in his grip and reached for her face. 

“I need to make sure your nose isn’t broken,” he said trying a different tactic and felt his frustration surge at her relentless stubbornness. “Let go, I don’t want your help,” she shouted and tried to shake free of his grip. 

“You know I don’t have to ask your permission,” he growled and demonstrated just how much strength he possessed by yanking her close and lifted her off her feet. Livia raised her chin and tried to hide her fear as she spoke. “You’re going to do what you want, but I’m not giving you anything,” she spit. 

He felt anger well up inside and fill him, “then I’ll take what I want.” 

He admired her forced courage as he set her back on the floor and found himself again surprised when she swung her arm suddenly and gave his face a healthy slap. 

He loosened his grip briefly and she shook his hand off her wrist. 

Livia pivoted on her heel and scrambled her shaking hands on both sets of locks of the closed front door as he lunged at her, forcing a guttural cry from her throat. Her breath left her body as they crashed back to the floor, her fear was pungent and hung in the air as his hands scrabbled across her and captured her wrists behind her back.

“Stop,” Bane stated and spoke his words gently against the back of her head as she tried to catch her breath.

“Are you through struggling?”

“Please, let me up,” she said ignoring his question.

Bane removed his hands from her wrists and let her turnover, he was ready for her elbow or fist to come flying at him and she didn’t disappoint. Her left hand shot out, curled in a tight fist with an objective of hitting him in the nose. He blocked her fist and brushed her arm to the side while letting his blocking hand slide down her forearm and capture her wrist. 

She tried to strike out with her other hand and he easily grasped that wrist also, he slammed her wrists to the floor above her head and pinned her lower body to the floor with the bulk of his weight. She felt the pressure of his body as he settled against her. 

“Okay, okay, okay,” she said rapidly, “I’m not going to fight you, please let me up,” she begged with a growing note of panic staining her voice. 

“You mean like before?” he asked with noticeable amusement. 

She frowned up at him and tried to push against him with her body. “Let me up,” she demanded angrily. 

“No,” he said in a heated tone. “Especially as long as you’re doing that,” he said as she pushed her body up against him in her thrashing. 

He was reluctant to draw attention to her movement as he had been enjoying the light press of her pelvis against his and the soft touch of her breasts under the remnants of her silky, blood saturated blouse. Bane chuckled when Livia froze and watched a slow blush form on her face. 

“How can you ask me something like that? Why me?” she asked softly, not meeting his eyes.

Bane felt her body sag with defeat and resignation. 

He felt his words cease to come as his mind whirred. “What do I tell her?”

Bane was afraid to hurt her, her body felt supple while also retaining the fragility of a baby bird under his hands and body. He shifted as she lifted a hand to press her stained cuff to the renewed flow of blood from her nose. 

“What are the other crimes the news didn’t report?” she asked when the silence became too much too bear.

“You’re as smart as you are beautiful, it’s all much worse than your imagination could paint,” he murmured as he brushed his fingertips across her bloodstained lips.

He inhaled and caught her warm scent coupled with the sweet odor of fear as she held her breath. 

He could feel the anxiety rolling off her, he had never experienced the feeling of wanting someone the way he wanted her. Bane had never truly craved a woman with every cell of his body before he saw Livia. 

“What are your plans for me?” she stammered and flinched when he slid his hands to settle on the outside of her hips. 

“I always longed for someone like you, but knew it was unlikely to happen,” he said ignoring her question and squeezed her taut flesh a little harder. “What kind of person am I?” Livia asked and breathed in slowly through her nose. 

Bane traced his fingertips along her jawline, trailed his touch down her neck and across her shoulders before speaking. “You’re irreplaceable,” he started and slid his hand down her smooth forearm to close around her slim wrist. 

Livia tried to yank her hand free when he closed the first metal cuff around her wrist. Before she could fully process, he had her other wrist cuffed tightly in front of her. 

“I can’t have you attempting anything so foolish again,” he murmured in a lovely but empty tone. A sound only those with great mental suffering and distress could hear. A dog whistle for internal turmoil and ground zero for emotional combustion.

Livia heard him as he lifted her to her feet. She heard his well-camouflaged basal needs crying for fulfillment, his hope nearly run dry.


	6. The Consequences of Refusal

Bane pulled her assertively by her cuffed wrists and pushed her back into a plush recliner. She stiffened and held her breath when his hands landed on her shoulders. 

Livia looked up at him, his frame cast a shadow over her, she felt like she was standing at the base of Vesuvius. 

“Do you feel you can calm yourself?” he murmured and squeezed the tops of her shoulders.

She cleared her throat and looked up at him. She nodded, not trusting her voice. 

Bane nodded and stepped back from her. She watched him warily as he retrieved the fallen fireplace poker and replaced it with the rest of the set before he returned his eyes to hers. 

He gritted her teeth behind his mask, his lower back beginning to ache from the exertion after weeks in a hospital bed and lack of conditioning. 

As Bane began to speak, in the heart of Gotham, Blake took a late morning beer break and happened to catch the Breaking News report of the jewelry store heist and chemical weapon massacre. 

“Goddammit,” he shouted and hurled his nearly full beer at the wall where it shattered into hundreds of glass pieces decorated with alcoholic foam. 

He yanked on his coat and jammed a hat over his head and practically jogged out of his house and the fifteen blocks to the bar where most of the Gotham PD frequented. 

Blake shoved open the door and found a trio of his off-duty friends. They hailed him over and were already ordering another round as he joined them at the high table and perched on one of the creaky stools. 

Blake and the other men began doing Jager bombs as the news report on the grisly murder replayed in the background on the large HD screens. 

Blake and the other men began running through hypotheticals, like Monday morning quarterbacks if they were the ones investigating. None of the men or virtually anyone who saw the footage that was capture on bystander’s cell phones and security store cameras was accompanied by a warning every time before it was aired.   
Blake and most every law enforcement and government official clearly recognized Bane even from the grainy, jumpy footage. 

One of the officer’s felt like Blake was blurring the line between hypothetical dispensation of justice and actual. 

“Well look, its Chuckie fucking Bronson over there,” he said as he raised his glass. 

“Fuck you Logano, we could find that fucker before anyone else, expedite justice.”

“Fuck off man, you’re already suspended, Gordon will fry you for trying something like that.”

“Then maybe it’s my time to fry.”

The men regarded each other over the blue cigarette smoke haze in the air, levity morphing to seriousness and all of a sudden, their reptilian brains released a wave of   
chest-pounding, grunting, barely bipedal male forms that existed on testosterone and adrenaline. 

“Alright Blake, fuck it, justice moves too slow even in D.C.”

Blake and Logano looked over at Nabokov who drew in a slow lungful of acrid smoke from his Cuban cigar. He shook his head, “he’ll probably get some bleeding-heart yuppie legal scum sucker attorney who’ll get him a padded cell and making macaroni pictures for the rest of his goddamn life. Let’s go put him down before he sucks on our country’s tit for the rest of his life.”

As the trio of two active and one suspended officer finished their drinks, left a hefty tab, and stumbled outside, back in the safe house, Bane regarded Livia from where he stood in front of the brick fireplace hearth. 

“What do you choose moving forward with your life and existence Livia James?” he asked in a melodically solemn tone. 

Livia’s eyes widened. “You want an answer now. 

“Yes.”

She swallowed hard, “I can’t answer that right now.”

“When can you?” 

“Stop, I can’t answer that either,” she pleaded as she dropped her head and looked down at her cuffed hands and summoned the embodiment of the Goddess Diana lifting her bow as she feigned shoulder shaking, body wracking sobs. She stifled a relieved chuckle that her crying would distract him and give her some critical time she knew she mustn’t squander.

Livia looked through the bottom fringe of her eyelashes and mumbled, making her voice hitch, drawing him closer. She increased her frantic tone until he had no choice but to lean down to try and discern her words more clearly.

As soon as the tips of his steel-toed boots came into view from the thick fringe of her lashes and the sound of his whistle-like breathing rate grew louder, Livia put all of her energy into her arms and leapt to her feet as she swung her cuffed wrists in a smooth upward arc. 

He outweighed her by quite a bit, but she caught the curve of his cheekbone exactly right and split the skin with the harsh bite of the cold metal cuffs. 

Livia turned sharply towards the door, her heel nearly slipping on the hardwood floor and made it to the front door with the speed of a gold medal sprinter. She felt the wave of his anger reach out and touch the middle of her back as she swung the door open and threw herself full force into an outright, arms pumping as much as the cuffs allowed, chest heaving run.

She muttered a thank you to herself for forcing herself to hit the treadmill near daily and felt false hope fill her conditioned form as she glanced back and didn’t initially see him. 

“Stop running,” Bane shouted in the direction she had bolted, hearing her feet smash twigs and foliage as she willed herself to move faster. 

Livia’s balance was severely affected by her cuffed wrists as she nearly stumbled over a fallen log. She cursed as a tree branch sharply whipped her cheek and felt a wave of fear when his voice sounded again, seemingly closer but still out of sight when she glanced over her shoulder.

“Stop running,” Bane yelled again and knew he was drawing closer when he heard her piercing shout as a thorny bush scratched her arm. 

Bane bit back acidic bile as his lungs began to burn, the exertion too much after open heart surgery. He grunted and pressed a hand to the center of his chest as a cramp ripped through his midsection. 

He looked around the heavily wooded area and narrowed his eyes when he caught the flash of her movement through the brush. Bane stared up at the bright midday sun, pausing as the sunlight was filtered through the lush foliage, trying to remember the last time he had hunted prey in the daylight.

He had evolved in the darkness, was part of it, unlike the billionaire bat who wore the darkness as a removable cloak, a hand-stamped tourist. 

Bruce Wayne would always be a visitor to the darkness, Bane lived there, his life was like a plant that existed without photosynthesis and was now tracking a woman that ignited nuclear fission inside his core and threatened his remaining hold on sanity. 

He willed himself to move faster when he heard her give a sharp cry of pain followed immediately by a large splash. Bane found her lying on her side in the bitterly cold water of a naturally occurring creek. Livia sobbed frightfully in the chilly water. 

Livia flinched and waved her handcuffed arms weakly at him as he approached, he slowed his pace at her open display of fear. 

“I’m just going to make sure you’re not hurt,” Bane murmured and sank down next to her. She grew still at his close proximity and stayed completely rigid as he moved his hands delicately but thoroughly from her cold toes, both feet now bare, to the crown of her head. Once he was satisfied that she had only sustained minor bumps and bruises, he slid his arms around and under her until he could lift her easily into his arms. 

Bane felt her start to stiffen and spoke quickly, hoping to diffuse any struggling. “You need to get warm; I’m going to carry you back to the house and start a fire.”  
His tone didn’t invite discussion and they were both silent as he carried her, she was resolutely still the entire time and every time he spared her beautiful pale face a glance, she had her eyes squeezed shut. 

She opened her eyes when he had to shift her to close the door before, he settled her shivering form onto the same recliner. 

Livia’s body was past the point of trying not to show how cold she was.

“You need to warm up now,” Bane muttered and firmly but carefully pulled her into the circle of his arms. 

Despite the bone deep cold, Livia managed to stiffen and start to struggle until he asserted his strength and kept her locked in place against him. After she stopped squirming, he began to tug and pull at her wet clothes. “You need to warm up,” he growled and forced a gasp from her throat as he roughly moved her around, yanking her clothes free, ripping, and tearing the fabric, anxious to feel her bare skin. She knew there was not much chance of preventing him from doing what he wanted but still fought as much as she could despite the limited use of her hands and spit a healthy glob of mucus up at him. 

“Do this right,” he thought as his eyes darkened with a potent combination of fiery lust and furious anger as he easily asserted his tremendous strength as he yanked the last of her wet clothes free and briskly rubbed his hands against her cold naked flesh. “Take care with her,” he reminded himself as he moved his hands over her bare chilly skin. 

“You need to warm up,” Bane mumbled as he groped his hand blindly on the back of the recliner and yanked a rough brown afghan around her shoulders. 

He pulled the scratchy afghan tighter around her shivering, naked form and turned his attention to the large open mouth of the brick fireplace. He loaded the cast iron grate with dry kindling and shredded newspaper before he could add logs that would burn longer and spit out more heat. 

Livia happened to look up with the intention of letting the warm wash of heat touch her face and saw him press a hand to the middle of his chest.

“Are you okay?” she asked on halting syllables.

“I recently had open heart surgery,” he said simply.

“You don’t look like a heart patient,” she scoffed.

Livia’s breath caught in her throat when Bane stripped off his snug thermal shirt.

Her eyes drank in his bare skin but also the pink fleshy scar, like a zipper into his chest cavity.

Livia forced herself to only look him in the eyes as she lifted her cuffed wrists. 

“Can you please take these off?”

“Are you through trying to fight me and run away?” he asked as he walked towards her and left her with nowhere to go as he pulled her upright by her cuffed wrists, his hands enveloping hers. 

Livia nodded.

“Say it,” he ordered.

“Yes, I’m done,” she said and uttered a startled cry when he adjusted the afghan until he could pull her against his broad, bare chest. 

“Shhh,” he murmured musically, her skin deathly cool to the touch. He moved his large hands in slow circles on the bare skin of her back as she stayed as rigid as the corpse she felt like. 

As Livia tried to get her breathing control, the side of her face pressed against his chest over his strongly beating, recently repaired heart, in the tropical island near the equator, billionaire Bruce Wayne received a call on his satellite phone from Lucius Fox who filled him in on the Bane jewelry vault genocide. 

Fox sent Bruce some surveillance uplink footage that wasn’t available for public consumption. As Selina and Bruce pored over the footage, looking for something different each time they viewed it, back in the safe house, Livia’s body temperature began to rise to the land of where she felt more like a living human being within the strong circle of Bane’s arms. 

Bane knew she still needed to get her body temperature higher, “you need a hot bath,” he murmured and shifted his grip before he rose to his feet, cradling in his arms bridal style. 

Livia was too exhausted, cold, and sore in nearly every part of her body to offer much in the way of resistance as he walked down a short hallway to an outdated bathroom with an antique clawfoot tub. 

He set her on the closed toilet lid as he filled the bathtub with hot water and looked over to where she had the afghan held tight around herself in a death grip.  
Livia gave a startled gasp as he started to peel off the rest of his clothes and heavy boots after he set out a stack of green towels with a coordinating blue geometric designs.

“What are you doing?” she asked in a near rhetorical manner as he slowed his movements in removing the last of his clothes and filled his gaze and tone with palpable naked lust as he spoke. 

“I’m going to help you clean up,” he said in a gentle but commanding tone. 

Livia summoned the little strength she had remaining and feebly struggled when he pulled her afghan wrapped body up into his arms, lifting her feet from the faded linoleum floor. 

Bane adjusted his grip and slid one hand up the back of her neck and cradled the back of her skull, pulling his hand into a fist around the silken fall of her hair, forcing a gasp from her throat. 

“I thought you were through fighting me?” he murmured and pressed his masked mouth to the cool skin of the curve of her neck and inhaled as much of her scent as he could over his sharply scented aerosol nerve painkiller.

“You didn’t get incinerated in the vault; he could’ve killed you fifty times over by now,” Livia reminded herself as she allowed the rigidity to leech out of her and let him pull the afghan free and lower them both into the hot water. 

He tugged her back against his chest as he reached for a washcloth. He soaped up the cloth and ran the sudsy fabric across her shoulders.

As he ran the saturated, soapy cloth over her naked skin, his mind recalled the recent memory of Jenifer’s similar cleaning touch as he lay cuffed to the hospital bed, her touch gentle as she cleaned his nail beds free of blood and other thicker bits. 

She felt him saturate the strands of her dark hair before mixing in and massaging a fresh scented shampoo into the heavy length. Livia let her eyes fall closed as his strong fingertips massaged her scalp, she hated that she enjoyed his firm touch. 

She squeezed her eyes shut as he rinsed her hair, “turn around,” he growled musically. 

She didn’t argue as she turned around and met his eyes. Livia felt overly exposed and crossed her arms over her breasts. 

“Don’t hide from me,” he ordered raggedly and pulled her hands out to her sides, letting his eyes unabashedly bask in the view of her wet nudity, soapy translucent bubbles sliding down the slopes of her breasts and popping when they reached her dark pink hardened nipples. 

Bane softened his tone as he released her wrists and ran the corner of the damp cloth across her forehead and gently down the bridge of her nose assessing the swollen skin.

He dropped the cloth and yanked the rubber plug from the bottom of the tub. “I’m going to help you dry off and get you to bed,” he murmured and felt her hands press against his chest and he spoke before she could gather her thoughts. 

Bane watched her eyes widen at the mention of bed, his voice was too raw, naked and gave a heavy charge to his words.   
He watched her slide back until the rounded edge of the tub stopped her progress. Livia’s head was full of his earlier words about physical follow-through and a complete dismissal of her own desires. 

Bane reached for one of her hands submerged in the hot, soapy water. He spoke urgently as he squeezed her hand in tandem with his spoken syllables.   
“Just to sleep.”

Livia blinked slowly as he continued. 

“You can close your eyes and rest without fear, no harm shall come from me or anything else living, now and in the future.”

Livia was torn between tugging her hand free of his as she met his eyes. “What if I refuse all of this? Refuse your protection from harm?”

Livia froze under the sudden intense focus of his gaze; she couldn’t see his mouth and could only guess what expression was hidden from her eyes. 

Bane released her hand and leaned closer until the sudsy water sloshed over the sides and splashed the faded linoleum.

He forced a startled gasp to spill from between her lips as his hands were suddenly on the edge of the tub on either side of her shoulders as he continued to shift until he could tug her impossibly close to the front his broad naked body.

“Then I will find out what your lips feel like beneath mine,” Bane growled as he brushed his index finger around the perimeter of her full lips. Her heart twinged as he continued, dropping his voice until it was a primitive mammalian growl. “I’ll hear how your breathing changes when I fill you,” he whispered impossibly low in an expression of early man as he dropped his hands under the surface of the water and danced his fingertips up her inner thigh until they were dangerously near the apex of her femininity.

“I’ll find out how you taste,” he murmured with unrestrained power behind his eyes as she held her breath and never blinked as his fingertips were sheer millimeters from brushing against her intimacy.

Livia found a sliver of strength to force her hand to drop to his wrist and pause his momentum.

“Please stop, please let me sleep,”

Bane paused and considered her plea, wondering briefly if she had a plan to try and eviscerate him with the shampoo bottle. 

Bane remained wordless, his face painfully neutral as he scooped her up from the water, shifting his grip for the dark towels and wrapped one loosely around her before carrying her to the large bedroom which was the first left upon leaving the steam-filled bathroom.

He dropped her unceremoniously on the bed where she pulled the towel tighter around her wet body as he returned to the bathroom and rooted around the medicine chest. She heard the crack of the faucet briefly before he returned with a chipped coffee mug. 

“This will ensure you sleep without interruption,” he finally said and dropped two round peach-colored pills into her shaking palm.

“What are they?” she asked and glanced from the pills up to his still neutral face, trying to read anything in her eyes.

“Just something to help you sleep, I will not violate your sleeping body. Please don’t fear that I will rut you like a pig in the forest as you lie there, I very much want you present when you give me your body.”

Livia cleared her throat and felt her face might actually explode from the rush of color at his words and unblinking eyes. She chewed the pills and wrinkled her nose at the acridity before washing the opiate detritus bits down with the tepid tap water. 

Her hands shook so poorly, more water spilled down the front of her then hit her lips. 

Bane took the glass from her and pulled back the linen so she could settle under the sheet and comforter. 

Livia fought a flinch as he adjusted the covers around her frayed form, “let yourself sleep without fear.”


	7. Breaking News

As Livia’s body succumbed to the strong pair of pale pills, she visibly sagged, the mattress could’ve swallowed her whole and she wouldn’t have been able to offer a shred of resistance under the opiate’s stranglehold. Bane could almost see the remaining fight lift from her like steam off a scorching sunny summer sidewalk.

He waited until her ragged breathing began to soften around the edges before he perched on the side of the bed. Bane tugged the brilliant blue towel free from under the linen and dabbed at the excess beads of water on her knuckles and the exposed skin of her bare chest. He mopped the translucent floral scented drops off her enticing bare flesh before turning the towel to his own chest and the tender pig pink scar running down the center of his broad pectoral muscles. The parched fabric heavily drank up the perfumed water droplets, the strands bloating upon contact.

As Bane cast her sleeping face one more glance before extinguishing the light, back in the heart of Gotham City, Blake and his pals were all crashed at his house, stuck in hangover hell. 

They had all shambled out of the bar, way too intoxicated to drive and had trudged the three-million- mile trip back to Blake’s house. Logano woke up in the half-dug koi pond, wet vomit and dirt stuck to the side of his pasty face. He squinted his red eyes as he scratched his crotch and stumbled into Blake’s living room, where the man of the castle looked like he had passed out while dry humping his sofa. 

Blake’s mouth was half-open and spilled forth a shiny puddle of drool as Logano cleared his throat loudly and hacked a mouthful of phlegm and bile into Blake’s dirty kitchen sink.

Blake jolted awake as Logano shuffled through items in his cupboard and found a half-empty bottle of bubblegum pink belly cure-all syrup that he poured down his acidic gullet. 

Nabokov was the least worse for wear or it was the half-bottle of pain killers he had on board as he passed Blake a modified Bloody Mary, he’d been able to put together with Blake’s bachelor kitchen inventory. 

Blake drank deeply of the heavy-handed, black peppered hair of the dog, and in the kitchen Logano did the same.

The three men were subdued for a bit and each took a turn in the bathroom taking long showers and clearing their sinuses before settling heavily around Blake’s shitty 

Swedish big-box retail purchased kitchen table, their stomachs settled enough to accept a bellyful of coffee. 

“Alright,” Blake said as he cleared his throat and drank deeply of the black, bitter brew. “What’s first?”

“The surveillance footage, I’ll head to the station and see what the footage has revealed, see if we can get a jumpstart in the right direction,” Logano said as Nabokov nodded and added. 

“I’m going to raid the gun room; Karyn is working today, and I made that bitch squeal like a seagull in a bread factory last Friday. She’ll let me check out however much I want without having to log it,” he said with an all-male chuckle. 

Blake and Logano’s masculinity chimed in despite their pounding headaches. 

Both men looked at Blake who was scrutinizing the glossy surface of his French Roast. 

“Sorry man, I know you can’t come to the station but,” Logano started before Blake interrupted him.

“It’s fine, there’s plenty else that needs to be done. Can you get my keys, I’ll get the tires checked and fill it with gas?”

Nabokov fumbled in his pocket and tossed his keys towards Blake, “don’t chance crossing Gordon, those keys are on his fucking desk. Don’t let him suspect anything, take mine, I’ll ride in with Logano.”

Blake clenched his jaw but knew Nabokov was right.

The men went over a few more details and continued their discussion on the not as long walk back to their parked cars outside the now closed bar.

Logano and Nabokov piled in the one SUV and Blake in the other, they drove in opposite directions with plans to meet back up at Blake’s in the late afternoon.

As the three men divided and conquered their vigilante to-do list, in the tropical getaway, far removed from the NSA’s grid, Selina and Bruce had found several   
identifiers in the surveillance footage that Fox has transmitted them to them. They were deep in discussion over a certain still-frame that was simultaneously being   
viewed in the office of Commissioner Gordon in the center of the bustling station of the Gotham City Police Department.

Gordon lit a cigarette and pulled deeply on the rolled tobacco as he squinted at the van’s departing license plate captured in a very out of focus freeze frame. 

As Gordon ran a hand through his already messy hair and angrily dialed the records room for the fifteenth time, he slammed his phone down in the cradle as he was met with another busy signal. He decided the shitty station coffee and selection of stale pastries was the much-needed break his body needed and left his desk covered with piles of files on Bane and his vast connection to seemingly every lit bit of Gotham between his and Talia’s reach as the philanthropist Miranda Tate.

As Gordon popped a few donut holes raining powdered sugar on his facial hair and staying behind on his fingertips, back in the secluded safe house, Livia slept in the comforting arms of the powerful medication and more so under Bane’s watchful eyes. 

He opened the window to let in the cool evening air and clear out the room’s stuffiness. Bane let his eyes fall closed as the jasmine-scented air washed over his face.  
Bane inhaled deeply and pulled as much of the fresh air into his lungs as possible with the mask serving as a titanium gatekeeper. Bane found himself constantly amazed at the glory he was finding present in the daylight, the discoveries he was making that stimulated his senses and made him long for the sun to stay in the sky instead of salivating and craving the fall of the inky black darkness. 

He was accustomed to feeling vulnerable under the sun, like a bee grounded from cooling temperatures and left exposed to the world on the concrete. Threatened by flying, crawling, or walking predators. 

Bane turned away from the window and caught sight of both of their reflections in the dresser mirror. 

He narrowed his eyes at her sleeping peaceful face as he thought of her unanswered questions. 

Bane replayed her words and searching gaze; fear and anxiety a potent and hypnotic scent that teased his epididymis. 

“Why me?” his mind replayed her asking.

Behind his mask, he opened his mouth to speak but nothing coherent emerged.

“Why me?” 

“Because I’ve never seen someone like you before,” he whispered to their reflections.

“Why me?” 

“Because I felt a desire for life that I’ve never felt the moment my eyes found you.”

“Why me?” his mind replayed as he went and perched on the side of the mattress where she was on her side facing him. 

“Because you see me,” he murmured and brushed an errant lock of hair behind her ear.

“Why me?” he heard her say in his head as he brushed the rough pad of his thumb along the sleeping curvature of her lips. 

“Because I’ve never craved another living being in the way I want you,” he said raggedly and managed to suppress a frustrated groan to a low rumble.

Livia mumbled suddenly and began to stir awake.

Bane held his breath as she rolled onto her back and covered her mouth as a yawn overtook her.

He cleared his throat to not startle her too much.

The small sound made her open her eyes and rub the sleepy grit from the corners of them.

“Are you feeling well?” he asked, careful to keep his expression and tone neutral.

Livia nodded, “I guess, is that water still around?” she asked as she looked at both nightstands.

She gratefully accepted the glass he had refilled and noisily drained it as Bane watched on.

He felt a wash of desire tease his senses when his eyes remained on the plump drop of water clinging to her lower lip. Bane pressed his lips together behind his mask   
when her pink tongue darted out to sweep up the solitary left behind drop. 

“I’d like this to be the beginning, our start, bury our violent beginning,” Bane stated as he pulled the empty glass from her before enveloping both of her hands in his encompassing grip.

Livia heard a combination of a scoff and chuckle slip from her lips as she tried to yank her hands free. 

Bane tightened his grip until she gasped as it was one squeeze away from being painful. 

“Please,” he finally said, the word feeling clunky on his tongue, it had never mattered before if someone was disagreeable towards anything he said or did. 

“Just like that?” she finally managed as he lessened his grip.

He nodded.

“I can’t answer that,” she said as she shook her head and renewed trying to tug her captured hands free. 

“You’re still unable to answer?”

“Yes,” she said with a sniff as she spit bitterly. “You’re not considering my feelings at all and being way too pushy.”

“I can assure you that I’m keeping myself restrained as well as certainly considering you in the forefront of my thought process,” he said lowly.

“Mmm hmmm,” she nodded. “What pray tell would be so different right now if you weren’t considering me in your equation?”

“Do you want an honest answer?”

Livia froze, his razor-sharp words made her breath evaporate and her blood run cold. She realized how stupid she’d been to start down that path and tried to verbally back pedal as she furiously shook her head.

She lost the ability to formulate words when she met his eyes.

Bane capitalized on her sudden loss of words and let his eyes remember the glimpses of her bare skin under her clothes. “I think I will tell you,” he growled musically, the heavy words rumbling throughout his broad chest. 

Livia tried to slide backwards in the bed away from him, fruitless with his ironclad grip on her wrists. 

As Bane regarded Livia, gesticulating as his hold on her wrists remained unbreakable, back in the posh Swiss Chalet, Bryce Langdon practically rubbed his hands together as he watched satellite news report after news report of the successful jewelry store heist and its subsequent and unfortunately high body count. 

Bryce returned his phone to his inner jacket pocket after Addison’s incoming call confirmed the successful heist. Addison would be meeting whichever criminals survived at the safe house the following mid-morning.

Bryce put a Japanese news report about the heist on subtitles as he smoothed his hands over the smooth glass of the display case with the bare-fingered plastic mannequin hand. It would soon be wearing the ring that retained part of Anastasia Romanov DNA. The stones glittered with the tears shed along with her innocent blood. 

As Bryce opened an obscenely priced and aged oak barrel whiskey, back in the safe house, Bane stood which only caused Livia’s anxiety to surge.  
Bane felt the very moment he lost his battle of wills with his lust over reasoning as he gave a smile she couldn’t see before he spoke. “On second thought, I think I’ll show you,” he murmured heavily and yanked her abruptly off-balance and towards him. 

Livia gave a startled shout when he wrapped her up in his strong arms. 

“Wai…,” she started to say before he covered her mouth with his hand, his palm rough against her smooth, full lips. 

She shook her head as he pushed her flat against the mattress as he situated himself closer to her until he could press his pelvis against the curve of her bottom.  
“Shhh,” he murmured as he let more of his weight settle against her until he reduced her ability to move underneath him. 

Livia spoke rapidly behind his hand as he yanked the linen away from her, exposing her naked skin to his eyes and rapidly surging lust. He used his free hand to fumble at the zippered closure of his steel-grey cargo pants. 

She froze when she felt his hardening cock press against the curve of her bottom. 

“If I lift my hand, you mustn’t scream or I’ll need to remedy that,” he murmured lowly.

Livia nodded and took a few thankful, ragged breaths when he lifted his hand. 

She felt her belly clench with fear when he began stroking his rigidity, his breath coming harder as he pressed his masked face against the side of her neck. 

“Don’t,” she started to say as he smoothed his hand from covering her lips to sliding down her side and cupping her bare breast. His fingertips teased the soft nipple under it hardened his touch.

“Shhh,” he wheezed as he squeezed her breast rhythmically in time with stroking his cock.

“Not that,” Livia shouted shrilly and felt sobs threaten to break her voice as she felt him rub the head of his cock along the wet folds of her innermost intimacy. 

“I’m not going to take anything you don’t want to give,” Bane added in a strangled groan as he felt his orgasm an imminent event at being so close to being able to sink inside her femininity. “Are you currently giving yourself to someone?” he asked on a musical groan.

Livia shook her head, feeling too much to be able to speak anything that would make sense.

Bane felt a rush of relief at her denial of a lover. “You’re too much of a distraction, I can’t think when I’m near you but I don’t want you to be out of my sight for a moment,” he admitted and massaged the supple flesh of her breast, tightening his grip until he made her gasp. 

Bane wanted to drown in that sound, he would need nothing but those sounds from her to sustain his life and guarantee immortality. He groaned and muttered incoherently against the warm skin at the base of her skull as he yanked the bed linen to catch his hot, sticky come. The cotton fibers absorbed his spilled seed as he kept his masked face pressed against the side of her neck, her carotid pulse dancing wildly under his lips. 

As Livia and Bane caught their breath, a thin film of sweat drying on their exposed skin, back near the equator in a hut sitting atop white sands, Selina paced the floor, angry at her failure to check and see if Bane was dead after the cannon had slammed into his midsection. 

“I should’ve checked, it would’ve taken what two minutes?!? I could have prevented all of this,” she moaned and buried her face in her hands. Her ego had been decimated when she saw the news footage of the very alive Bane, upright and dragging that poor young woman from the jewelry store. She was instantly nauseated as she watched the shaky bystander footage of Bane hopping easily behind the wheel after he threw the young woman in the back of the van that Gotham PD and many other people were trying to track down.

“Don’t do this to yourself, Bane should’ve been dead. No one would’ve expected him to rise.”

“You would’ve,” Selina said and sniffed hard as she raised her eyes and met Bruce’s sympathetic gaze. “You would’ve taken the time to check if he was still living and remedied the situation.”

Bruce couldn’t truthfully argue what she had said, so he crossed the room and wrapped her up in his embrace.

As Selina felt herself break apart, shattered by her failure and brutally raw dogged by her ego, halfway across the world in the quiet safehouse, Bane was reborn from the ashes of a failed plan and broken body. Bane’s soul rose from the ashes as he drank in Livia’s scent, pulling her essence deeper than into his lungs, using the suppleness of her skin and titillation she wracked his senses with to be reformed, the breath of life returned to his soul that had suffered a lifelong drought of unfilled need and an unrequited return of emotions.


	8. No Compromises

As Selina cried herself to sleep in the circle of Bruce’s arms, on the other side of the globe, Bane shifted so less of his weight was forcing Livia into the mattress but still close enough that his bare flesh hovered over hers and made an involuntary shiver pass from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes. 

Bane heard her pull in a lungful of air and hold it as his body remained so close that air would’ve had a hard time getting between them.

Livia tensed when he smoothed his rough fingertips down the outside of her arm, along her forearm, until he could trace the deep oval bruises he’d made around her slim wrist. 

She shifted under the scant space he had given her and groaned at the million different aches that blossomed upon her movements. 

Bane was disappointed at the first words she spoke to break the silence but unhappy to hear them. 

“Can you please let me up?”

“Where do you want to go?”

She cleared her throat nervously and tugged at the tangled linen, trying to find some shelter from his eyes. “I’d like some time alone, take a bath…...think,” Livia finally whispered, feeling the weight of his gaze.

“Do I have to be concerned with you trying to bolt on me again? Tunnel out of the bathroom?” he asked and tried to inject a pleasant tone to his distraction at being so close to tasting and filling her. 

Livia managed to shake her head, “I don’t have the energy for an evening run,” she finally admitted and rubbed her eyes as he remained molded around her. 

“On one condition,” he murmured to the fall of her silken hair. 

“What?” she asked with heavy reluctance to the single syllable. 

“You need to roll over and look at me when you ask?”

As Bane waited for Livia to react to his words, in a nearby city, Addison Campbell watched a repeat broadcast of the local Gotham Nightly News, he smiled in approval that the handcuffed man in the ICU bed had followed through with such enthusiasm and vigor. Addison tilted his head in confusion when the news coverage showed a frightened Livia being dragged to the van by Bane’s masked and fearsome form. 

“Why did you take her?” Addison asked the Bane on television as he dialed room service for a dinner of bay scallop gateau and dry white wine. His bags were barely unpacked so he would be able to expedite his drive to the safe house and the retrieval of the Romanov ring with diamonds that were bottomless with the capacity of their beauty through suffering.

As Addison dined, his credit card number was pinged from a federal watch list assembled after the murderous heist. 

Officer Logano saw the GPS information come in and heard the officers begin the bureaucratic back and forth about assembling a task force.

Logano capitalized on the disorganization amidst the multiple law enforcement groups that were converging in the heart of Gotham City. As the station was immersed in disjointed chaos, he was able to sneak out some critical surveillance images and loosely collected file of folders. He brought the information back to Blake and Nabokov.

As the trio of men dug through the murky little-known details about the heist and massacre, back in the safe house, Livia slowly rolled over in the tight circle of Bane’s arms. 

Bane lifted a hand to cup her pale face before he lowered his masked mouth to her slightly parted full lips. “Release your fear,” he murmured, his exhale warm even through the front of his mask as he added in a lower tone. “That all belongs to a time in the past and has no place here.”

He clenched his teeth behind his mask until his jaw popped, he longed to rip his mask free and possess her body before claiming the rest of her, wanting to be   
waterboarded by the gasps and moans he created from his touch.

“Talk to me,” he demanded on a musical murmur as he shifted and slid his hand to her bare belly. 

Livia covered her mouth as a genuine laugh threatened to sound. She cleared her throat before she spoke. 

“I’m scared,” she admitted and added with a tense chuckle. “I wouldn’t mind two minutes or five hours to relax.”

“What happens at the end of that time?” 

Livia looked over his shoulder, “I don’t know if I’m supposed to know the answer,” she finally managed.

Bane shifted his weight, keeping her trapped against the tangled linen on the bed. 

“Take as much time as you want to relax and then come back to bed,” he murmured raggedly into the curve of her neck.

Bane heard her let out a shaky exhale.

“Am I telling you or are you willingly going to return to the bed and me?” he asked when she stayed mute in his formidable embrace.

Livia pressed her lips together as the heat of Bane’s words whispered to the very marrow in her bones.

“Can’t I just ask, request, some time to myself? Please?” she nearly pleaded, cringing both inwardly and outwardly at her pathetic tone. 

Bane felt her fear and anxiety threaten to turn her nervous system to stone in his arms. “Shhh,” he finally said and pressed a few of his fingertips to her full lips. “Take as much time as you want,” he murmured and let his touch linger until he took his time shifting his weight until she could slide from underneath his broad form. 

As Livia tugged the top sheet around her nudity and nearly stumbled on her way down the hall to the bathroom, back in Gotham, Blake and his two officer pals scoured incoming and outgoing messages on the dark web that referenced the jewelry heist. 

Logano brought a signal booster and the contact info of a few confidential informants that knew how to breathe in the necrotic depths of the dark web. 

Livia kept pressing the soapy washcloth to her mouth to keep her sobs contained. She cranked the faucet every time the water began to cool or when she was overwhelmed by sobs and drowned them out with the rush of water.

Despite the roaring sound of the water, he heard her crying and several times put his hand on the tarnished doorknob. Each time letting his hand return to hang loosely at his side. Bane had zero idea of how to provide any form of comfort. 

As he returned to staring out the window as night crept in, Livia soaked in the antique tub, the water up to her chin. “What do you really think of him?” she asked herself as she soaped up the cloth and ran the soapy fabric down her leg and back up, shivering as she recalled his assertive touch on her delicate skin. 

She shivered in the hot water as she remembered the feeling of his body near-consuming her as he succumbed to his pleasure against the curve of her bottom, not the usual men she knew with little to no self-control or the more common species of male that didn’t grasp the concept of the word “no.”

As Livia closed her eyes and dropped the cloth over her eyes, outside the closed door, Bane grew bored with his view of the darkness. This was not the darkness he lived in though, light existed from nature and the very stars of the sky.

Bane rehearsed acknowledging that he did say that she could take as much time as she needed, but it had been close to two hours and he was tired of the closed door between them. 

Livia bolted upright in the tub, splashing sudsy water to the floor as he knocked sharply and jiggled the locked doorknob.

“Yes?” she asked in what she hoped sounded casual.

“You’ve spent long enough in there; I have something you can wear to sleep in.”

“I’m not ready to get out of the tub.”

“I’m not inviting a compromise,” he said in a haunting tone outside the bathroom door.

“What does that mean?” she asked as she tried to not make much noise as she stood in the water and wrapped a towel around her midsection.

She didn’t hear his growl of frustration. She didn’t see him frown and his watch his hands clench into fists as he forced himself to remember that it would only scare if he kicked the door open. Diplomacy was never a needed tool for him.

Bane closed his hand around the doorknob, “the liaison will be coming early in the morning and we’ll need to get on the road soon after. It would be good for you to get sleep if you can, I don’t know how long we’ll need to drive for somewhere safe.”

She unconsciously pulled the towel tighter as she spoke to the flimsy door between them, checking that the pitiful lock was still in place. “Just for sleep?” she managed on a lilting stammer.

Outside the door, Bane closed his eyes. “Do I mean just sleep?” he asked himself. “How long will I let her refuse me her body?”

“Just for sleep,” he conceded before she opened the door in a towel wrapped around her body and another around her wet hair. 

Livia followed him back to the bedroom and accepted the oversized shirt for sleep. She asked him for another peach-colored pill so that sleep would abduct her. She worried she’d stay awake all night being so close to him, feeling the press of his hot, hard skin against her back. 

Bane had reluctantly let her escape to a drugged sleep and had whispered good night to her as she slipped away from the conscious plane. He brushed her hair off the side of her neck and pressed his masked face against her flushed skin.

He felt the rigidity of her fear leech from her limbs as her nervous system collapsed under the weight of the powerful opiate. 

Night passed for many of The Gotham Players around the globe.

Some slept, like Livia with exhausted dreams kept even more sedated by the powerful opiate.

Some slept, fitful, with nightmares, like Selina Kyle as she sweat in between night terrors.

Some were wide awake planning murders like Blake, Logano and Nabokov. Some were awake, out of their element, like Bruce as he tried to comfort Selina. 

Some were sleeping simply fine; Bryce and his personal assistant Addison were quite content in their high thread count bedding. Everything in Bryce’s life was transactional and so far after a few broken eggs, this transaction was progressing swimmingly. 

Some were in that in-between state of too much caffeine battling not enough sleep as Gordon’s elbow kept giving out on him and dropping his sleeping face to his desktop. 

Just one was awake, jolted painfully awake, dreams with abrupt images of life-taking actions thrust him to a panting hard but no longer dreaming state.

Livia was practically snoring under the higher than needed dosage, Bane pulled the comforter up and around her shoulders as he slipped from beneath the covers. He walked over to the rectangular window on the far wall and opened it further, the night air stimulated the bare skin it kissed. 

Bane glanced over at Livia’s blissfully sleeping form as he stripped himself free of his remaining clothing and rejoined her under the covers. 

He gently tugged her into the warm circle of his arms, longing to find comfort and respite from the remaining fragments of his dream. 

Bane found himself quickly distracted as he immersed himself into the astonishing feelings, thoughts and memories were filling him, making him remember a time in the dark that was in diametric opposition to how he was feeling now.

Bane squeezed his massive arms tighter around her, squeezing hard enough that she made an uncomfortable sound in her sleep. He readjusted his grip and practically glued himself to her back as he recalled the times he had held Talia this close, the times he had protected her and sacrificed his body and, on many occasions, nearly his life in service to her. She would bestow treats upon him as she would any mongrel that stroked her ego or cowered in her very shadow.

He allowed himself to let his thoughts carry him from the now cremated Talia who had been neatly packed into a nondescript urn to the faceless women he had buried his human surges of lust inside. Women whose names were never known, they provided a service, those women never held meaning. 

Bane let his top hand drift to the outside of Livia’s thigh. 

Bane was content to lay awake until the early dawn streamed in through the window. He heard her breath change as she began to rise through the layers of sleep until she stirred awake in the warmth of his suffocating embrace. 

“Did you sleep well?” he asked her as she rubbed at her eyes and gave a series of small yawns. 

She gave an incoherent positive sound as he tightened his top hand’s grip on her hip now that she was awake. He gave a frustrated growl, not knowing how long he had until the well-dressed liaison appeared. 

Livia couldn’t interpret what he mean with his nonverbal sound. 

“Are you okay?” she asked and casually shifted not realizing he had stripped to nothing before he molded himself against her.

He mumbled an agreeable sound as he slipped his hands to the hem of her borrow nightshirt and began to tug it upwards. 

Livia’s bra and panties were drying on the bathroom towel bar. She had scrubbed the armpits of her blouse vigorously. She had started to clean her pantyhose but those had sustained mass runs from any number of ways and were now in the unlined trash can of the bathroom. 

Bane gave an all-male grunt, the growing heat of his body threatened to scorch her as he pushed her hand away from the shirt when she attempted to hold it in place. 

“Turn around,” he rasped as he stilled his hands on her shirt.

Livia’s nervous system remembered her earlier response to the fear and anxiety. Her fear kept her in the frozen state between fight or flight and she could only manage to shake her head. 

“Turn around,” he demanded in a voice that many heard right before any number of arteries was severed by him personally or at his specific direction. 

Livia’s primordial reptilian brain remembered that kind of power from the sheer forces of evolution and moved in minute increments until she was facing him, realizing only then that his naked body was only separated from her own by the cotton shirt. 

She avoided his gaze as he continued to tug upwards at her shirt and blew out a heavy breath as he spoke words dripping with shame. “I have no control around you,” he admitted.

Livia couldn’t help but offer a genuine laugh. “I doubt you’re ever not in control of anything,” she finished on a gasp as he yanked her hips close, she had no choice but to rest her hands on his broad chest. Livia could feel the hard, muscle tissue of his chest under the smooth palms of her hands. She found herself having the sudden and terrifying realization of wanting to feel more of his bare skin and fought a blush.

Bane caught her gaze and accurately correlated it to her wanting to touch more of him, but he also had to acknowledge the fear, curiosity, and confusion beyond her body’s desire.

He continued pulling at her shirt, one good yank away at exposing her intimacy. 

“I don’t want you to do that,” she shouted shrilly when he shifted them around until he could insinuate himself between her thighs. “Stop scaring her,” his mind chastised as the large muscles of her upper legs began to tremble. 

“Do what?” he asked on a musical rasp.

When she remained in silence, he shifted so he could continue pulling at the fabric until her bare skin was exposed to his eyes. 

“Do what?” he asked with a harsher tone as he settled back, keeping her thighs firmly locked around his face but allowing him to openly look at the bare line of her body.

He practically salivated as he was fully able to drink in her naked body. For the first time Bane noticed the turtle shaped birthmark in the crease of her thigh.

Bane captured the center of her brain and forced her optic nerve to only see him as he rubbed his thumb around the edges of the birthmark’s raised skin.   
“How many people have seen this?” he asked huskily.

Livia pushed his hand away and tried fruitlessly to scoot back from him. “No one worth mentioning,” she mumbled as he shook her hand free and let his eyes find her birthmark again. 

He danced his fingertips up the smooth skin of her inner thighs, the large muscles trembling as he added in a melodically soothing whisper. “It’s worth mentioning.”

Livia froze as he moved one large hand to push her backwards with an abrupt press of his large palm against her sternum. He returned his rough-skinned hands to the polar opposite smooth skin of her inner thighs as he pressed her legs further apart and pressed himself closer. Her breath caught in her throat as their intimate flesh brushed against each other.

“Tell me every detail of every person who has ever seen this,” he demanded on a ragged groan and swallowed back a mouthful of spit from thinking about ripping his mask free and pressing his scarred lips to her innermost intimacy.

“Tell me,” Bane ordered, music staining his assertion as he licked the pad of his thumb and rubbed it in slow circles over her clit until her trembling thighs began to clench with pulsing need.

Livia shook her head, “I don’t want to talk about that,” she finally said before he forced an involuntary moan to tumble from between her lips as he continued making slow circles around her hardening clit, her body threatening to betray her. 

Bane smiled behind his mask as he felt her intimate folds moisten under his touch.

“Why the secrecy?” he murmured and increased the circles he made against her until she couldn’t pretend to not be enjoying his touch.

“Please sto…...,” she started to say before Bane shifted and covered her mouth with his other hand. He never stopped the intermittent circles against her private   
wetness as he lowered his masked face to where his hand covered her mouth.

“If I stop asking you about your past, will you let me keep touching you?”

Bane didn’t need a translator to know her answer was a very affirming yes before she nodded, her body tensed underneath his touch as she felt herself approach an orgasmic abyss. 

“Thank you,” he murmured in such a way that she felt her breath leave her lungs at the same moment her pleasure center spasmed and sent a Krakatoa equivalent shockwave of uterine vibrations spread throughout her body. 

Bane shifted as his fingers grew slick in the throes of her orgasmic aftermath, his cock was painfully hard pressed against the tangled bed linen, his rigidity pulsed in time with his racing heartbeat. 

As Livia opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t find the breath to form coherent words, back in the heart of Gotham City, Blake and his two pals ordered a greasy breakfast to soak up the remaining alcohol in their systems. As they waited for the food to arrive, Addison’s credit card information populated some results on the tablet’s screen.

“So why do we care about this guy?” Nabokov asked over Blake’s shoulder as he pulled up information about Addison Campbell.

“He was at Aphrodite fifteen times the last two weeks but he never bought anything or checked in or out of the vault,” Blake said as he clicked on a dropped case against Addison for art forgery, the complaining party died and the case was dissolved. 

Blake’s search system came back with the coordinates of where Addison’s card was last accessed, and the trio of men loaded in Logano’s SUV and took turns driving towards Addison’s location.

As the men approached, Addison was in the fact of packing up his few used items. He had no idea that every minute that passed, Blake and his pals drew closer.   
Addison tossed his small bag in the back of the sports car, smiling at the fuchsia pink bag in the back seat from the lingerie boutique. He was having dinner the next night with his mistress and wanted a happy, silk, and satin ending to the evening. 

The next few hours passed as Addison left the hotel before Blake and his men arrived. Blake checked into the very same room after a hefty cash payment and was able to tap into the hotel’s surveillance system and eventually track Addison by the pings from the cell phone towers as he headed towards the safe house. 

Blake and the others followed Addison at a decent distance, certain the well-dressed and artistic man was leading them to someone especially important.

As Addison drew closer to the safe house and unknowingly led Blake and pals along, back in the safe house, Livia was still looking for her breath as Bane moved up the length of her body, squeezing her against him, her breasts smashing against his chest. 

“Talk to me,” he murmured raggedly, hearing a series of low gasps instead of words emerge from between her lips.

Bane wanted to capture the sensation that was scorching his senses as he ran his hands with growing urgency over her body. He pulled Livia into his embrace and squeezed his arms arounds around her until she was breathless. 

He was overwhelmed by the electricity bouncing through his nervous system instead of the fearful carousel that existed deep in the darkness and never came to a stop. 

The pastel ponies often chewed through their bits and carried one away to a backwards land where humans were skewered by golden poles, adorned with ribbons, and had their backs joyously bounced upon by other horned mammals. 

Bane shook his head as he knew that the clock was ticking on the arriving liaison and an imminent need for their departure afterwards.

“There’s not enough time for what I want,” he growled and forced himself to pull her shirt back down, her nudity becoming too difficult to handle.


	9. A Natural Lie Detector

A confused frown formed between her eyes at his heavy gaze and words.

Bane spoke before she could ask him to elaborate.

“A lot of things needed to be dealt with efficiency and expediency,” he murmured as he stroked the rough tips of his fingers along her prominent cheekbone as his mind conjured flash frame imagery of severed arteries exposed under his blade, hearts ceasing to beat in a completely opposite fashion of his that pounded in his   
broad chest.

“This is different, you are different,” he murmured raggedly and reluctantly extricated himself from her until he was standing and gathering his discarded and scattered clothing. 

Livia’s eyes widened and tracked his every naked motion from the ripple of movement in the large muscles of his quadriceps and the curvature of his shoulders into the broad planes of his chest.

Bane felt the weight of her eyes long before Livia noticed him watching her drink in every heartbeat of his nudity. 

Livia was shaken to reality when his heated words fell around her, she pressed her lips together and lifted her eyes from his still engorged cock that hung heavily   
between his thighs. “Have you had your fill?”

He smiled behind his mask at the blush that touched her face and exposed skin. She ignored him and searched for own clothing; she couldn’t deny the charge behind his musical teasing.

As Bane and Livia packed their few belongings, growing closer, Addison took the exit from the freeway that would eventually dump onto a potholed side street and eventual dirt road to the safehouse.

Blake and his men were still on the freeway. 

Logano cursed and pounded the steering wheel, all of them panning the multiple lanes for Addison. Nabokov almost choked on the toothpick he was gnawing on when he spied Addison’s upscale car on a parallel road. “The next exit, that one, right fucking now,” he shouted and nearly grabbed the wheel as many horns blares and tires smoked as Logano got them off the exit and in Addison’s wake.

As Addison continued on, oblivious to anything much as he dialed Bryce and said he was headed to the safehouse and would call him back as soon as he had the ring in hand.

Bryce swooned on his 17th century French chaise lounge as he waited for Addison’s call.

At the safe house Bane heard Addison’s imported engine approach and turned towards Livia.

“Stay in the house,” he ordered her before he met Addison in the dirt driveway.

“How’s the place?” Addison asked amiably. He truly could sell anything to anyone.

“Quite fine,” Bane said in a melodical stilt, caught off guard. “Thank you,” he said as he quickly recovered and added. “The two that were lost won’t be found. The   
others were collateral.”

Addison nodded. “Unfortunate but understandable. Here,” he said, “is your clean slate and passport to anyone you want to be, within certain parameters of course,” 

Addison said and withdrew an envelope with the silver flash drive that Bane could use to become someone new with no record. 

“Which parameters are those Mr. Campbell?”

“Oh, please it’s Addison, and no offense but you hardly seem like a man that’s going to offer a specific kind of massage and maybe provide some company later, but I’d love for you to experiment.”

Bane chuckled dryly. “No, your observations were quite correct as I assume you saw on the news footage but have neglected to mention.”

Addison watched Bane pull out the envelope that held Anastasia Romanov’s ring before he spoke. “Oh, you mean the young lady you shoplifted?”

The men exchanged the envelopes. Bane plugged the drive into a remote reader and verified the contents as Addison scrutinized the ring. 

They both simultaneously nodded in satisfaction.

“Wait here a moment,” Addison said and pulled the boutique bag from behind the passenger seat. 

“A bonus, little something extra,” he said with a wink as Bane wordlessly accepted the pricey bag. 

Livia watched Bane and the well-dressed man in a tailored grey suit exchange envelopes. 

Her interest in the recognizable lingerie bag that was handed to Bane was crushed and she couldn’t help the scream that flew from her mouth as the austere looking 

man’s head exploded from a rifle shot at more than two hundred yards away by officer Blake.

Livia watched as Bane moved with animalistic ferocity and feral grace and was suddenly scooping her up and pressing her against the blood-stained front of his body. 

“I swear I’ll keep you safe,” he murmured and squeezed her until it was difficult for her to breathe as he exited the house after plucking a black nylon bag from a hook in the laundry room. 

Livia squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her face against the curve of Bane’s neck as he fired an automatic gun towards the trees as he carried her to a destination unknown to her. 

Livia heard grunts, screams and multiple gunshots before Bane unceremoniously dumped her into the leather seat of Addison’s Italian sports car and peeled off into the clear morning. 

Blake gathered the men and found that Logano had taken a hit to the flesh of his thigh and Nabokov’s chest was bruised from the bullets stopped by his Kevlar vest.

They took over the safe house and Nabokov played the role of field medic as they examined the entire house and perimeter for any shred of evidence before Gotham PD or a federal agency arrived. 

Bane had Livia search the glove compartment and found an envelope of cash and a frequent stay hands-free check in to a posh set of worldwide hotel all-suite chains. 

She typed in the hotel name in the search bar of the navigation system and Bane pressed the accelerator and urged the sports car to get to the closest hotel about an hour away when the directional coordinates displayed on the HD screen.

Bane looked over when he parked the car in the rear of the lot and saw how uncomfortable she was and grabbed a leather satchel from behind the seat before they let themselves into the hotel room. 

She was picking blood out of her shirt buttons when his voice fell around her. 

“The liaison gave me this before he was killed, there might be something you can wear in here.”

Livia looked over when he held out the bag.

She scoffed and shook her head, “nothing in those bags is ever for anything functional, a vastly different kind of quality with an exceptionally low quantity of fabric. 

What about that?” she asked as she pointed at the designer bag.

“I’m sure whatever is in this bag is just fine, we will not be leaving this room for at least the night and I’d like to ensure your clothes get properly cleaned.”

“Can I at least see if there’s anything in the case?”

“No, I prefer you wear whatever is in this bag.”

“That’s okay, I’m sure there’s a bathrobe, this place looks expensive,” she murmured and practically skipped to the bathroom. 

“No.”

His single syllable froze her midstride and she turned and met his gaze. Her eyes dilated, he advanced towards her and she backed up until she was stopped by the wall. 

Back in the heart of Gotham City, Gordon woke from a needed nap, drool stained the evidence photos of Talia’s autopsy. 

Gordon opened his eyes, initially blurry until he put on his glasses. His eyes narrowed in on Blake’s truck keys on the corner of his desk. He realized he hadn’t had a single harassing call or visit from Blake and that his two follower friends were oddly out of sight when it seemed every officer was at the station. 

Gordon asked around and eventually with enough confirmed reports issued a BOLO for Blake and pals. As the three now wanted men recovered in the original safe house and regathered their faculties, assessed their ammunition quantities, in the spacious hotel suite, Livia begrudgingly took the designer bag from his hands. 

Bane watched her frown and heard her swear under her breath as she pawed through the posh shopping bag. 

“Are there any other choices?” Livia asked hollowly and couldn’t see the dangerous smile pull at his lips behind his mask.

He nodded before he spoke, “none come to mind but I’m open to suggestions.”

“Could I just clean up and put on a bathrobe?”

He leveled his gaze at her until she unconsciously pressed herself back against the wall harder. 

“You can clean up and put on whatever is in that bag.”

“It’s too early for this,” Livia stammered as he closed the remaining distance between them.

“What’s this?” he asked raggedly as he planted a hand on either side of her and leaned close enough that he could smell the faint odor of her warmth above his inhalant. 

Livia and Bane had completely opposite thoughts when a cell phone began ringing from Bane’s heavy coat he had hung on the back of the door. Livia blew out an audible sigh of relief, “you should get that.”

“You think something as simple as an incoming phone call is enough to move me from this spot?”

Livia nodded as she spoke rapidly, stumbling over her words. “I don’t think anyone has ever called you just to his ‘hi’,” she said with a scoff. “I think any call to you is important.”

Bane looked down at her, knowing she was correct but also knowing that the ringing phone belonged to Addison Campbell who died without pain as his cranium exploded from the hollow tip bullet. 

The phone began a second ring as Bane slid one hand up the back of her neck and cradled her skull. “I need her attention, I can’t let things move at her pace, nothing too harmful though,” he thought as he closed his hand into a fist and yanked her head back, elongating her smooth neck.

He whispered lowly above her pounding carotid artery; he wished his mask weren’t in the way. “You may go clean up, but you will put on whatever is in that bag without another word of argument. Is that understood?”

Bane misinterpreted her sharp intake breath as a preparation for a rebuttal and pressed his fingertips against her lips waiting until Addison’s started to ring a third time.

“I urge you to stop pushing the limits of my generosity. I made you certain promises but don’t test their strength,” he added in a low musical threat and pushed away from her before the phone started on its fourth ring. 

Bane didn’t say anything when the call connected.

“Addison? Addy? Are you there?”

Bane held the phone away from his ear as the whiny white tower voice echoed in his ear canal. 

Bryce stopped speaking when he heard the mechanical sound of Bane’s breathing reach through the phone. “Is this….is this….Bane?”

“Yes. You’re the buyer of the piece of antiquity I stole for you?”

Bryce chuckled, “yes, I’m quite a collector and historian, very interested in you as well,” he said breezily. His Swiss chalet was located one block adjacent from Mt. Olympus.

“Your associate is dead,” Bane said bluntly.

“That’s unfortunate but you, you’re okay? I’m guessing you’re enjoying this time with your new lady friend?”

All pretense of humor fell away from Bane and he arranged a meeting place with the billionaire himself a few days drive from the hotel. 

Bryce couldn’t help but let his childish impatience bleed into his voice when he questioned why such a long wait, he wanted his new toy now. 

“There’s absolutely no need for you to need to drive that long, I’ll send a chopper to the closest clearing.”

Bane smiled behind his mask, a smile just for himself. “No, I prefer providing my own transportation and there are a few things I need to address on the way,” he said vaguely. 

Bane could hear the affluent man child’s shoulders slump through the phone lines as he reluctantly agreed to see him in 72 hours. 

Bane ended the call, not disclosing his stalkers Blake and friends, he wanted them all to himself.

As Livia shut herself in the bathroom and filled the separate tub with soapy water and let her clothes start to soak and stew as she used the standalone shower and scrubbed every bit of Addison’s blood off her body, Bane took as thorough of a bath he could in the kitchenette sink. 

Livia twisted up her wet hair and dried off before she pulled on the miniscule lace nightgown that was going to be a gift for Addison’s mistress. She assessed her reflection in the mirror, debating wrapping a towel around her midsection but knew he’d make the repercussions for that more than emerging in the small amounts of designer fabric which charged by the inch for fabric.

Livia found if she tugged at the hemline it revealed more of her breasts and if she tugged it upwards it exposed the matching tiny triangle of fabric that was supposed to qualify as panties. 

As she couldn’t force herself to leave the bathroom, Bane approached the closed and locked door. He was not going to entertain another hours long closed-door solitude session.

He knocked on the door and made her jump.

“Yes?” she asked from within the bathroom.

“You’ve been in there long enough, come out without making me repeat myself,” he said lowly and heard her quickly fumble at the doorknob and cheap latch.

Livia opened the door too slowly for his liking and when he pushed it open the rest of way he immediately lost his hold on any remaining resolve when she appeared in the mistress’s designer gift. He felt his breath catch at the exposed line of her thigh from the tiny gown. His eyes found the curves of her breasts within the plunging cleavage. The glow from her warm skin shone through the thin liquid silk fabric, the panties underneath were miniscule and as thin as vellum. 

“Is there anything stronger to drink than water?” she asked, uncomfortable under his continued and wordless attention. 

Bane never looked away from her scantily clad body as he pointed at the minibar. 

Livia steeled her nerve and walked stiffly to the squat mini-fridge and opened a small bottle of eighty-proof amber alcohol. 

She turned her back to him as she drained the small bottle. Her heartbeat was so loud in her ears that she didn’t hear him and jumped when he was suddenly behind her. 

Livia welcomed the softening haze of the strong alcohol, feeling naked in front of him. 

Livia held her breath as he smoothed his hands up her sides over the silken fabric. He let his hands massage her sides and smoothed his fingertips to tease her nipples   
under they were hard points under the barely there fabric. 

She broke out of her paralysis as his hands moved to the thin straps at her waist and began tugging at the sloppy bow that held her breasts somewhat behind the thin fabric. 

“Stop, can I ask something please?” she asked on a nervous chuckle as he pulled the bow apart until the fabric fell open.

“Please,” she said shrilly and dropped her hands to her wrists. 

“What is it?” he asked, immediately aware of the musical anger that emerged through the front of his mask. 

Livia dropped her head as he stilled his hands and stopped tugging at her minimal silken clothes. His cock luxuriated in the electricity from her trembling and began to grow uncomfortably hard behind his zipper.

He felt a pleasant wave at her gasp when she felt him grow hard from where he pressed against the curve of her nearly bare bottom. 

“I know I said I wouldn’t take anything you didn’t want to give but I can’t stop thinking of touching you,” he growled when she remained in silence.

“Do you want me to keep touching you?” he groaned as he slid his hands up her exposed midsection and cupped her breasts, rhythmically squeezing until she was gasping. 

“Do you?” he murmured musically as he slid one hand from her breast down to cup her barely clothed intimacy at the apex of her thighs. “The body is the most accurate lie detector, are you enjoying my touch?” he groaned and yanked at the paper-thin panties.

Livia lost the ability to form coherent words as he tightened his grip on her breast as he teased his fingertips in slow circles around her hardening pleasure center.

“Do you want me to keep touching you?” he growled against her ear as he teased a finger slightly into her tight opening and found her dripping wet. He wanted to fuck   
her that moment right against the counter without a further word. 

“What else are you not telling me?” he murmured. 

“There can’t be much you don’t already know,” she gasped as he returned his finger to making quicker circles around her clit until she was practically breathless. 

“What do you think I know to be true?”

“That I’m afraid of you, that I’m terrified you’re going to kill me,” she admitted and felt a film of tears fill her eyes. She dared not to blink, keeping the tears unshed as he softened his tone. “You’re frightening her,” his mind chastised him, and he tried to disrupt her growing anxiety as he swept her up in her arms and carried her to the   
unmade bed.

Livia tried to catch her breathing as Bane pulled her thighs tight to the sides of his hips. He smoothed his hands up and down the outside of her thighs until he had her attention. 

“Since you brought it up, there are a few questions I have for you.”

“I didn’t bring up the idea of a one-sided Q & A,” she said quickly.

“You may ask me anything you’d like.”

“I wouldn’t know if you were lying.”

“I’m sure you’ve watched lots of those legal television shows, do I look ‘guilty’?”

Livia scoffed, “those shows won’t help. I saw this actual footage of an interrogation of a known serial killer and he legitimately seemed liked a nice guy, but he ate a person and kept body parts in his refrigerator.”

Bane couldn’t help but nod, “I can’t argue that, but I will truthfully answer whatever you ask me.”

“Anything? Really?” she asked with a lilt.

“Yes, I’ll answer anything, do anything for you and give you whatever you want.”

Bane let his words hang in the air briefly before he moved down the length of her nearly naked body and shifted until he could drop his hand to fumble at his zipper.

“Why do you wear that mask?” Livia asked suddenly as he stroked his cock until the skin stretched taut over his rigidity.

“Years ago, I needed emergent medical help and wasn’t able to retain much but my life,” he murmured as he dropped his hands and roughly spread her thighs far apart on either side of his bare waist.

Livia held her breath as he continued in her silence. 

“Everyone wears a mask, most are invisible, what do you hide behind?” he whispered and dropped his voice to a husky one note tone.

Livia shook her head as he raised up and teased the head of his painfully hard cock against her innermost intimacy. 

“Tell me you will give me every part of yourself, inside and out,” he demanded raggedly and watched her lips part and her bladder suddenly tightened at the idea of saying something so bold. 

Livia shook her head, “I can’t say that,” she stammered 

“You don’t have to say anything,” he murmured and felt his courtesy nearly disappear like cotton candy in the rain, his cock ached to be inside her.

Livia bit her lip and shook her head as he smoothed his hands under the backs of her thighs until he could shift her closer and force her legs further apart. She started to let her eyes close before his voice fell around her. 

“Open your eyes and look at me,” he ordered hoarsely and let himself begin to slide into her a centimeter at a time until he could fill her no further. He let a musical groan fall from behind his mask before he spoke. “Stay with me,” he demanded musically as he buried himself inside her until the wet sound of their intimate flesh kissing reached his ears.

She gave a strangled cry as he filled her, pushing through the futile barrier of resistance her body offered against his rigid masculinity. 

Livia couldn’t prevent the tears from falling from her eyes and rolling down her face, the drops seeming to race to catch up with each other. Her tears increased and she couldn’t suppress her sobs as he filled her private center. 

Bane lowered himself to his elbows and cupped her flushed face, letting his thumbs rest on her full lower lip. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked on a grunt as her body stretched to accommodate him. “Why didn’t you tell me you haven’t shared your body with anyone?”

Livia felt paralysis hit her vocal cords and she shook her head, sniffing hard as more tears replaced the ones that had been absorbed by the tangled bed linen.   
Bane shifted so that his cock brushed the spongy sensitive spot deep inside her. He knew when he began massaging her secret pleasurable spot inside when her pupils dilated, and she arched her back against him. 

Bane smiled behind his mask, his all male thoughts leeched into his eyes as he stared down at her as her breasts crushed against his chest as the seeking touch and press of his cock made her body and nervous system sing. 

He felt a joining of their cells, like celestial bodies meeting and absorbing into each other. “Why have you allowed me to touch you, be inside you?” he asked on a musical gasp as he dipped his thumb inside her wet mouth, teasing her tongue. 

“Why?” he asked on a shudder as she lightly nipped his thumb with her straight, white teeth and gave a sudden sound between a choke and a scoff.

Bane saw concern lightly flash above the firestorm he was creating inside her body as she tried to mumble an explanation. 

Bane felt a moment of utter spontaneity brought on by the potent fog of being buried to the hilt inside her. His gratitude at filling her made him goofy and he lifted a   
hand to fumble his mask free.

“Don’t cry,” he grunted in a harsher, less refined musical tone and lowered his face to hers.

Livia moaned as a spike of pleasure was suddenly birthed inside her as he shifted his weight, the movement made his cock brush deeper.

“Don’t cry,” he begged in a melodic plea as he licked a line of salty tears off her face. His warm tongue swept over her prominent cheekbone and the edge of her lash line. 

“Talk to me,” he grunted as he felt himself nearing release.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she finally managed as her body took the reins and made her want to turn inside out as her orgasm hit her with a village-leveling wave and made her curl her manicured toes.

“Tell me I may kiss you,” he grunted as she shuddered under him, her innermost secret walls, wetly squeezing him. 

Livia nodded and muttered an agreeable sound, caught up in the wildfire he had started under her belly button.

Bane pressed his lips to her chastely until he felt her parrot his movements. He slid one hand to cradle the back of her skull and squeezed his hand into a fist in the silken fall of her hair as he deepened his kiss, darting his tongue against her full lips.

“Thank you,” he murmured as he briefly broke their kiss. She didn’t have the chance to ask him what he was thanking her for as he tumbled into his own orgasmic bear trap. Livia felt his seed fill her hotly as he shuddered above her. 

“Tell me you enjoyed that,” he demanded as he stared down into her flushed face, his cock still proudly rigid and completely filling her wetness. 

“Don’t make me say that,” she whispered as she managed to flush even brighter than her face already was. 

“You’re only telling me,” he whispered raggedly and cursed inside as he cock began to soften inside her, moments away from sliding out of her.

“You already know the answer,” she conceded as he finally let her non-answer suffice and adjusted his mask back on his face.

Bane shifted until he could lay next to her. He lifted her thigh and urged her to roll to her side so that he could mold himself behind her. She let him wrap her up in his formidable embrace and for a few moments they just raggedly breathed in collective silence.

“What happens now?” they each thought to themselves.


	10. A Price for Everything

As Bane continued to feel uncharacteristically tongue-tied and near insecure in the wake of taking more from Livia than she might’ve wanted to give, back in the heart of Gotham City at Mercy hospital, Jenifer finished her last break of the night before returning to the bustling ICU, always guaranteed to be busy on a holiday week.

Her soft-soled shoes squeaked lightly on the high-gloss surface of the linoleum as she checked on a new surgical transfer patient.

The pale man in the hospital issued blue gown was breathing on his own but still hadn’t risen to consciousness following an emergency craniotomy to relieve the pressure on his swelling brain.

Jenifer adjusted his IV line and flushed another with saline, muttering to herself all the stuff she had to do when her shift was over. 

She didn’t know the so far unidentified male was waking up as she repeated her to-do list like a mantra.

“Call mom, start defrosting the turkey, mail mortgage, call Lou about deferred tax payment…”

“What day is it?”

Jenifer flinched when the man’s gravelly voice reached her ears and she looked down to see him squinting his eyes open at her.

“Where am I?” he continued and looked around the bright hospital room with its symphony of beeps, hisses, and chimes of life-sustaining devices. 

“You’re at Mercy General, I’m your nurse Jenifer, you’ve been unconscious. Do you remember anything?”

The man closed his eyes as his mind tried to piece together the fragments of his immediate past.

“What’s your name?” Jenifer continued as the still anonymous man squeezed his eyes shut tighter, his mind beginning to paint a picture from his murky memories.

His thoughts swirled, like walking through a dust storm, his eyes burned from potent visuals his mind produced. 

Marble flooring, an anticipated nuclear detonation, an unexpected explosion, his boss, friend, comrade hit dead center by the costumed cat on the man bat’s borrowed bike. 

The ground rushing up to meet him as all hell broke loose in City Hall. The aftermath where he had been loaded on a gurney and transported in a lights and siren blaring ambulance. Emergency surgery performed on the identification-free man that was assumed to be an unfortunate bystander of Gotham’s Reckoning. 

“Do you know who you are?”

“Barsad,” he said weakly and drank deeply from the tepid water in the bendy straw that Jenifer offered before he started to babble on hoarsely.

“That’s enough for now Barsad,” Jenifer said easily and patted the top of his shoulder. “You’re awake and you know your name, that’s a fine start.”

As Jenifer updated Barsad’s chart and phoned the neurosurgeon to update him on the now identified patient’s prognosis, back in the spacious hotel suite, Bane felt himself becoming near suffocated with metastasizing insecurity as he pulled the lush bedlinen up and around his and Livia’s naked bodies.

He rubbed his rough-skinned hand in slow circles on her back, hating the thin sheet between his palm and her bare skin. 

Livia closed her eyes as they both remained locked in their own cages of silence. 

“Why did you let me?” he longed to ask her, force her however necessary for an answer. 

“Why did I let him?” Livia thought to herself as she ached inside and found comfort in the smooth circles of his palm. 

She could feel the questions he wanted to demand answers to as he shifted next to her until he could mold himself closer to her, staying wordless but bringing their bodies closer together under the linen.

Livia couldn’t ignore the fact that they fit so well together, she seamlessly fit in the circle of his arms and pressed in all the intimate places as their naked skin kissed. 

Bane was initially surprised when she began to turn in his arms but kept his expression neutral when she tentatively slid her arms around his neck and shifted closer.

He let his hands drop to her bare hips as he felt the barest tremble throughout her entire body as she tried to talk without her voice shaking. 

“You’re different, you see me,” she whispered and trailed off into silence. He slid his arms around her waist and pulled her closer as she brought her lips to hover over his masked mouth as she spoke. 

“I’m not, I’m not able to let go of my fears and I can’t say when I will, but I will try, because you’re different than anyone I’ve ever met,” she managed, stumbling nervously over her words. The heady scent of sex in the air was distracting as Bane let her words soak into his brain’s frontal cortex. 

As Bane processed her words and initially only responded wordlessly by tightening his arms around her, back in the safe house they had escaped from, Blake roughly rolled Addison’s assassinated form into a couple thick industrial tarps and secured the corpse into a tootsie roll shape as he fastened the tarp’s ends with a thick silver tape. 

Blake dragged the corpse to the back of Bane’s discarded SUV and wrangled the body into the third-row seating and slammed the heavy door.

He swore softly and went back and joined Logano and Nabokov who were nursing their wounds with the scant food and nearly full bottle of scotch in the rear of one of the cabinets. 

Blake shook his head at the two men who suddenly looked like they’d forgotten what they were fighting for. He felt like a general who needed to rally the troops. 

Blake started to address the men like he was standing at a podium in Munich but was quickly interrupted by Logano who held the 80-proof bottle towards him. “Save it man, we all need some sleep.”

He shook the bottle as he added, “we’ll get back on things after some shut-eye, lighten up Killer.”

Blake held back a sharp retort and took a few angry swigs of the strong booze and passed it back before settling on one of the mismatched sofas. 

Nabokov turned on the television and found the local Gotham news station that was currently on a commercial for reverse-mortgages followed by an ad for colon cancer pre-screening testing. 

As the trio of men let themselves doze on and off with the news replaying the same reports on repeat. 

Each report was similar to the one before but still not much more to report and even the DOJ was keeping quiet on the details of what exactly went wrong during the Federal Penitentiary transfer.

As the dazzlingly beautiful anchor consulted a panel of talking heads to diagnose and analyze Bane’s psychological profile with their Ivy-League degrees, Bruce’s satellite phone rang shrilly in his tropical beach hut.

Bruce anxiously greeted Fox’s calm voice who assured him that he was safe as was Alfred. Fox went on to say that it was indeed Bane who had somehow slipped his Federal prison transfer. Fox couldn’t confirm exactly what was stolen. He told Bruce that some of the recovered items didn’t match the described inventory and then there were items that were not even recorded. It seemed the jewelry store owner looked the other way when it came to following any kind of legal business policies. 

Bruce looked over as Selina pulled her hair into a messy bun and began packing them a suitcase for their return trip to Gotham.

Selina sniffed hard as she packed a pair of steel reinforced stilettos. “I’m going to check for a pulse this time and if I find one, I’m going to cut off his head,” she thought as she haphazardly packed and zipped the designer suitcase, anxious to raze Bane from the planet once and for all. She knew she’d never be able to sleep and would live in a constant state of turmoil knowing Bane was alive and a danger to anyone alive that hit his radar as something that needed to be eradicated. 

Back on the firm mattress in the posh carpeted hotel, Bane tightened his arms around her until his strength threatened to squeeze the breath free from Livia’s lungs.   
“She just gave you something,” Bane’s mind remind him tersely as it added. “Give her something.”

“Would you like to go soak in the tub? I won’t put a constraint on your time,” he tried to add in an easy tone. 

Livia nodded as he loosened his grip. They both slipped back into their clothes and Bane waited until she disappeared from view behind the bathroom door before he retrieved Addison’s cell phone and dialed a phone number from memory. 

He frowned and redialed when he reached an automatic voice stating that the number dialed was out of service.

Bane impatiently tapped out another number and after three rings the line was picked up.

The deep voice on the other end of the phone had dark web connections and was wanted by Interpol and several countries worldwide for being a dissident.

The man could get you anything you wanted and fulfill any kink for the right price. 

Bane stared at the closed bathroom door before he said what else he needed and ended the call. 

Inside the white-tiled bathroom, Livia breathed in and out slowly as she let the near-scalding water penetrate her tense body. 

“Are you actually going to try? Are you able to?” she asked the handful of shimmery bubbles she scooped off the surface of the hot water.

Livia couldn’t answer her own question and soaked a while longer before rejoining him in the small kitchenette. 

She was instantly aware of her hunger when her eyes landed on the club sandwich and tomato soup he had ordered for her. “Thank you,” she mumbled as he opened a soda and set it down in front of her.

When he was in the same room with her, Bane couldn’t keep his eyes from crawling all over her, memorizing every bit of her. He clenched his teeth until his jaw popped as he walked stiffly to the bedroom and tried to distract himself from obsessing for even a small moment in time.

While Bane tried and failed to occupy himself, Livia curled up on the sofa and fell asleep in front of the repetitive news reports. 

He walked out to find her snoring, sated with her full belly.

He smiled behind his mask, initially disappointed to not find her awake but his lust was quickly doused at the deep bruises he could see on her exposed skin. 

Livia moaned painfully in her sleep as he carried her to the bed, he tried to ignore the oval thumb prints he had forced to the surface of her skin after he burst through her internal capillary bed. 

Bane adjusted the bedding around her and checked the commandeered phone for messages. After finding zero messages, he returned to her side and tucked himself under the covers with her. Night passed for them uneventfully.

The next morning, Blake and his pals woke up and walked around the safe house before someone started a pot of coffee and Logano started scrutinizing dark web chatter about the recent jewelry store heist. 

Logano jotted out the phone number for Bryce Langdon Esq. almost not quick enough for Blake to dial it on an encrypted phone. 

It was immediately apparent that Bryce was not accustomed to answering his own phone and managed a passable, “hello?”

Blake had a voice converter attached to the phone, so he actually sounded like a grown man with two fully developed and completely dropped pair of balls.

“Bryce Langdon?”

“Yes?” Bryce said, clearly annoyed at the wasting of his perceived valuable time. 

“This is Sergeant Martin Wallace from Got ….. ham ….Ci …. ty….,” Blake said and purposely slurred his words and plowed on before Bryce could ask him to repeat himself. “Your name has been connected to a high-valuable robbery at the jewelry store Aphrodite.” 

Blake let his words hang in the air as Bryce collected his highfalutin thoughts. 

“Apologies, Sergeant Walters, there must be some awful mistake here.”

Blake interrupted him. “There’s no mistake sir, I’m going to need you to come down to the station for questioning.”

“Surely there’s another way can settle this more efficiently Sergeant Winters,” Bryce said smoothly, suggestive like a lover.

Blake covered the phone and smiled at the rest of the guys as he humped the back of sofa before continuing in a serious, somber tone.

“What in your mind is more efficient Mr. Langdon?”

“Well Sergeant Whitehall, not to diminish your career choice, but I imagine you’re vastly underpaid for the daily undertaking of your livelihood.”

Bryce continued when Blake remained silence, whether Blake was impersonating someone else or not, he couldn’t disagree the statement in any reality. 

“I’ll give you the date, time and location of where the stolen object will be, hand-delivered by the man who stole it and with any luck that poor woman he abducted if she’s even still alive. I want that ring and will pay you whatever your selling price as well as to lose my name and number.”

“Those statements are going to be hard to pass off as lies in the long term,” Blake started before Bryce interrupted him.

“Give me a routing and account number Sergeant Whittingham,” Bryce said and moved to his desk and navigated to his Zurich account.

Blake covered the phone again and Logan scrambled for an anonymous account and read the numbers to Blake who read them to Bryce.

Blake heard the sounds of the keyboards and then after a heavily pregnant pause, Logano gave Blake a thumbs up that there was now $50K in their account.

“That’s not even an appetizer Sergeant Wilkinson,” Bryce said smoothly.

“When is the drop-off?” Blake finally asked.

“Do we have a deal? What’s your price?”

Blake looked at the other two men and mouthed Bryce’s words. The three men whispered to each other.

“Sergeant? Are you still there?”

“I was consulting with my associates.”

“And?”

“Thirty million.”

Bryce whistled. “Well you have balls Sergeant Walsingham, should I bother negotiating or are you not that type?”

“You just need to transfer ten percent and provide me a date, time and location.”

Bryce blew out a heavy breath and looked up at the bare fingers of the mannequin waiting to wear the slaughtered girl’s ring. His eyes drew upwards to the Scream painting and he shrugged as he typed in the ten percent transfer. “I paid fifty for that painting.”

Bryce and Blake tied up the call with all the pertinent details after the transfer went through. Bryce provided the details of his alleged dead assistant Addison and   
Logano accessed the DMV and searched Addison’s VIN number. 

As the computer lagged under the poor internet connected, back in the posh hotel, the stolen phone began to ring from Bane’s coat pocket. 

The shrill tone woke up both Bane and Livia. She yawned and stretched deeply as he answered a call from the billionaire Bryce Langdon. 

The billionaire babbled when he heard Bane’s breathing. “I’m sorry Mr. Bane, someone is after you, a bad Sergeant Wilton, I want that ring. You should run, I’m sorry.”

Bane smashed the phone under his bare heel.

“We need to go, please pack while I secure us a different car.”

Livia nodded from the doorway. His tone didn’t suggest any sort of rebuttal. 

As Livia packed up and took the time to wash her face and brush her teeth, Bane ripped the VIN panel of numbers from Addison’s car and after ensuring the GPS system was still disabled, moved the car to a grove of trees a football field away from the hotel and hotwired a large SUV. 

She didn’t ask where the other car went and climbed onto the passenger side of the bench seat and buckled her lap belt as he drove at a reasonable speed to the interstate onramp. 

Bane glanced over at Livia’s profile and saw the chilly goosebumps sprout on her forearms. He wordlessly reached into the second-row seating and passed her his warm coat.

Livia nodded her thanks and slipped into the coat, swimming in its lush layers that were saturated in his warm, woodsy masculine scent.

As the hours passed after Bane merged the large vehicle along with the northbound traffic, Blake brooded in the passenger seat as Logano steered them in the direction of where Addison’s car and cell phone last pinged near a cell tower. Logano had managed to triangulate the location to the posh hotel where the phone was globally positioned until Bane had smashed it under his heel. 

Blake kept replaying looking through the scope and having Bane in the crosshairs. He hadn’t accounted for the wind direction or for Addison to move at the last possible millisecond before Blake pulled the trigger on the high-powered rifle. 

As Blake continued to mentally beat himself up, Bruce and Selina were in international airspace in Bruce’s private jet. The luxury jet was traveling nearly six-hundred miles-per-hour as it brought Bruce and Selina closer to Gotham City’s airport and closer to stopping Bane for good.

Bruce and Fox communicated over satellite phone plans once they landed as Selina tried to sleep, only able to grab fitful snatches as her mind was tormented at how much could’ve been prevented if she hadn’t gotten caught up in her swollen ego. 

She would never make the declaration of a death without a still heart to show for it. 

As the miles passed under the large SUV wheels, Livia and Bane listened to the radio, not really talking much. Livia was exhausted but too tired to nap.

Bane pulled into a gas station to fill up and told Livia to stay put. He pulled off his mask and braced himself as he paid for the gas and bought a burner phone. Bane didn’t need to worry about a news watching gas station attendant. 

The kid behind the counter never looked up from his phone. Bane could’ve literally had five heads and the bored kid wouldn’t have noticed

A couple hours later, Bane pulled into a shitty hotel that was a cash-only and generally rented on an hourly basis. 

“We’re staying here?” she squeaked and looked at some of the unsavory folks milling about.

“You are completely safe in every way next to me,” Bane murmured and dropped his hand to lightly squeeze the top of her thigh.

Livia pressed her lips together and nodded as he let her lock the doors while he checked in for at least one night and then parked as close to the room as he could and   
escorted her to the door. She asked him to check the room for any possible interlopers before she settled on the edge of the lumpy mattress that was not designed for sleeping. 

Livia finally relaxed enough to wash her face and brush her teeth again. 

Bane thought she had closed the bathroom door and didn’t notice it was slightly open and that the thin walls made his voice carry right into her ear. 

Livia frowned as he talked about new identities in between English and another language she didn’t understand. 

She counted to fifty after he ended the call before she rejoined him in the sparse room, decorated with a bed, chair, and small table with a squat tv. 

It was preprogrammed to enthusiastic porn when she switched it on and casually but quickly found the guide and changed the station to the local news. 

“How long are we going to be staying here?” she asked as she adjusted the volume to a low murmur with a current segment on the Dow Jones. 

“I’m hoping we’ll be able to leave tomorrow afternoon, I’m expecting some identification papers, credit cards and a couple other legal papers to be dropped off here tomorrow.”

“A new identity for yourself, is that what you were talking about on the phone? What happens to me?”

“Apologies,” he said with a sideways leer and cleared his throat before continuing. “New identities and lives for both of us, financial documents, a deed on a house with a thirty-year mortgage.”

“What else are you expecting?”

“Nothing you’d find of too much interest,” he said casually and toyed unnecessarily with the burner phone. 

“Can you tell me, and I’ll decide?”

“Some hybrid CD investments, a high-yield savings portfolio plan and a marriage license. There are also two leases on SUV hybrids that we can exchange and an option to add on to the deck and patio at the new place.”

“A marriage license?”

Bane nodded and she felt her anxiety spike in his silence.

“A license as in ‘we’re already married license’?”

Bane nodded again; his deeply pleased smile hidden behind his mask.

Livia opened her mouth to speak but didn’t have much to say except disjointed word gumbo.

Livia started to move towards the cramped bathroom, Bane could see that she had plans to try and play another game of hiding.

His lust surged at the same time as his frustration at not being able to force her feelings to change. 

“I’m sorry,” he murmured as he moved with an animalistic litheness and scooped her up before she had taken a full step. 

“I don’t have the energy to spare for chasing you,” he mumbled and pushed her roughly to the surface of the squeaky mattress.

“You seem to be quite energetic,” she spit as his hands seemed to be everywhere at once, pushing and pulling at her clothing. He forced a gasp from her throat,   
preventing her from a further rebuttal when she found herself staring up at him as he squeezed his fingers into the large muscles of the backs of her thighs and yanked her closer. 

“I’ll rephrase,” he grunted and captured both of her slim wrists in one of his large hands and pushed them above her head. Livia had to arch her back to compensate for the pressure on her joints where he pushed her wrists against the rough fabric surface of the bed. 

“I don’t want to spend energy chasing you, I want to use it fucking you,” he growled crassly as he fumbled at the front of his pants until he could free his rapidly hardening cock. 

Livia felt an anticipatory shudder run through his body and soon felt his painfully hard rigidity pressing into the supple flesh of her inner thigh. 

Bane let his eyes fall closed as he teased his fingers along her wet folds and dropped his head to the curve of her neck, breathing deeply, trying to pull as much of her scent as possible into his lungs. 

He felt words spontaneously rise to his lips that he had to swallow back, words he had never spoken to another human being. 

Bane lifted his face from her smooth, flushed neck and stared down into her wide, unblinking eyes as he traced his fingertips along her jaw, a small moan slipped from between her lips when he traced the pad of his thumb over her lower lip. 

“You’re the most beautiful being I have ever seen,” he said on a grunt as he buried his hardness inside of her, stopping when their intimate flesh kissed. 

Livia could only gasp breathlessly as he plunged into her, making her thighs shake and her big toes point due north. 

Bane returned his hand to cup her jaw as he settled into an easier rhythm, wanting to bathe in the sensation the sound of sliding into her intimate wet folds and center elicited inside him. 

He gripped her chin until their dilated pupils met. 

“If you’re wondering if I’ll ever make you cry again, I won’t.”

Livia couldn’t look away as he adjusted his hips and brushed a secret sensitive spot deep inside her. 

“If you’re wondering if I’ll ever hurt you again, I won’t.”

Livia pressed her lips together as a delicious tingling sensation began to fill and spread throughout her lower body. 

“Please let go of my wrists,” she managed.

Bane released his ironclad grip on her slim wrists, grimacing when he noticed that he had added to the bracelet of bruises.

Livia let her hands hover over the broad musculature of his chest before she lightly let her palms settle on his warm skin. 

At her touch, he increased his pace and plunged into her intimate center until they both gave a combination gasp and groan at the end of each thrust. 

“I will do anything I can to earn a place in your heart,” he groaned before he felt his orgasm overtake him. He squeezed her hips until she squealed near painfully as he filled her with his hot, sticky cum.

Livia answered wordlessly by wrapping her arms further around him and resting the side of her face against his chest, her ear over his pounding heart.

She heard his words rumble throughout his chest as he spoke, “please love me.”


	11. Moonlit Dreams

Bane felt a wave of mortification wash over him as he spilled his guts wide open for her to see. He cursed inside and tried to keep his breathing even.

Livia heard him as sure as dawn follows night and let his words dance around inside her head. As most females, she knew when she had complete control of the following moment and the direction of the ship. 

Livia heard him try to conceal his relieved exhale when she chose to not call attention to his naked admission and instead glanced over at the television as the bright graphics of the Breaking News report flashed onto the screen and caught her attention. Livia fumbled for the remote and increased the volume until the bottle blonde’s mousy voice filled the room along with a picture of the high-end jewelry store turned crime scene Aphrodite.

As Livia listened to the news anchor discuss the heist and the still few known details, at the actual crime scene of Aphrodite, Gordon knelt in the decimated vault, metal, velvet lined boxes sprung open around him. Baubles, jewels, and stacks of cash hemorrhaged and scorched in the wreckage. 

As Gordon was scrutinizing the inventory sheet the manager had reluctantly provided, many handwritten erasable notes in the margins, back at the original safe house, Blake and his two friends loaded up the SUV with supplies they had poached from the house before heading out at a quick pace. They were zeroing in on the last known cell phone ping of Addison’s cell phone at the hotel before Bane destroyed the phone under his heavy heel.

Blake drove as Nabokov reclined the passenger seat, his chest still aching from the vest absorbing the bullet’s impacts, each breath painful as Logano stretched out on the rear bench seat, his tightly bandaged leg elevated on some military style backpacks.

Blake stared out over the hood; his only injury was his eviscerated pride. 

Back at the fleabag hotel, far away from where Blake and his pals were heading in the wrong direction at breakneck speed, Livia rolled back and strained her eyes to see Bane’s masked face as she spoke. 

“What did you steal?”

Bane shifted his weight and propped himself up on his elbow as he traced his fingertips along the smooth skin of her jaw. “You didn’t know what was in the vault?”

Livia pulled one of the threadbare pillows under her head until she was as comfortable on her back as possible as she shook her head.

“I never saw an inventory list for the vault, I didn’t have access to it either.”

Bane stared down at her wordlessly until she began to squirm. “What’s wrong?” she breathed. 

He shook his head, “absolutely nothing.”

Livia was saved from further discomfort when he murmured incoherently before slipping off the bed and going towards his stack of discarded clothing. 

She sat up as he pulled the stolen vault envelope from his inner coat pocket before he returned to the bed. 

“Stand up,” he mumbled as he held out a hand towards her. 

Livia let him pull her to her feet, clutching the thin linen around her nudity. She felt her breath catch in her throat as he dropped heavily to one knee as he dumped the contents of the envelope into his palm. 

She felt her heart stop for a moment as he slipped the heavy ring saturated with a history of slaughtered innocence around her left ring finger.

Livia’s breath left her body as she sat back down heavily on the edge of the mattress.

“It’s real?” she murmured as she stared down at the stunning ring passed through many hands after being poached from the actively dying. 

“All of this is real,” Bane growled as he yanked at the sheet hiding her nakedness from his razor-sharp stare. “All of this is real,” he repeated on a groan as he rose and pushed her back until he could join her amidst the tangled linen. 

As Bane’s hands moved urgently across her naked skin, far away from the rundown hotel, billionaire Bryce Harper paced in front of his massive stone fireplace and nearly stomped his feet as he had a spoiled man-child tantrum.

He squeezed his spray-tanned hands into small fists as he muttered to himself furiously, sparing the display case with the bare-fingered mannequin forearm frequent glances. 

“How could I have forgotten to see if that masked fellow was still going to proceed to the meeting point? How could I have been so fucking stupid? Where was my mind?” he asked himself as he glanced at the crystal clock on the mantle.

“What do I do?” he asked his father’s portrait, decades into the ground. 

As Bryce strained his ears to hear his dead daddy’s affluent whisper, back in Barsad’s hospital room at Mercy General, he woke up as Jenifer’s voice stirred him awake from a dream-filled nap.

“How’re you feeling?” she asked, pleased with his tremendous progress.

He smiled at her, noticing more and more that she was a female. “Better,” he said and dropped his voice as he added. “Can you close the door? I need to ask you something?”

“Sure,” she said with a raised eyebrow, instantly curious as he shifted in the bed and spoke in a low tone as she recorded his vitals. 

“What’s been on the news about the nuclear detonation and Ba…, and that masked man?”

Jenifer noted his oxygen saturation percentage before she spoke. 

“So far that masked guy has been identified as some kind of domestic terrorist Bane and was actually here as a patient for a while,” she whispered back in an even lower tone. Knowingly violating so many federal HIPPA laws.

“Is he still here?” Barsad asked. 

On the exterior he was collected but Jenifer saw his body betray the emotion behind his words as all his vitals began to climb.

Jenifer shook her head and dropped a couple fingers to the inside of his wrist to make sure the pulse rate was accurately reflected.

“Did you know him?”

Barsad shook his head and she felt the lie as his pulse rate jumped further into the stratosphere.

“You sure about that?” she asked and smoothed her fingers from his wrist to the top of his hand and drew small circles next to his taped IV. 

“You can talk to me,” she said easily when he remained silent as his heart galloped inside his chest cavity. “If you don’t want to talk, that’s fine. But, you need to take some deep breaths, or I’ll have to make sure you relax.”

Barsad nodded and closed his eyes as a fine sheen of sweat broke out on his body. 

He kept his eyes closed as she pressed a damp washcloth on his flushed face. 

“How did you know him?” Jenifer asked and didn’t let him know that she saw the film of tears fill and threaten to fall from his eyes. 

“We were friends, patriots together,” he mumbled and opened his eyes to meet her gaze. He needed to see the presence of loyalty and trust in her eyes before he continued. 

As Barsad told her every sordid detail about Bane, Pena Dura, Talia, and the tie to the Batman, far away, Blake and the others pulled up to the posh hotel and parked way down the street after circling once and seeing no presence of Addison’s car. 

Blake decided to take point and Logano slowly brought up the rear as they circumvented the room that the last known cellular ping had occurred. 

Neither men knew the last ping was captured right before the SIM card was decimated under Bane’s heavy heel. 

As Blake checked the door of the posh suite, hours and hours in the opposite direction, Bane growled as he couldn’t make his cock hard enough to fuck her again. He groaned against the warm curve of her neck as he fumbled a hand at his cock, urging it to rise to the occasion.

Livia felt his frustration as his touch turned inadvertently rough. 

Bane was broken from his fugue when her hands were suddenly on his masked face, her fingertips scrabbling the meshed-titanium free until she could expose his face. 

He held his breath and relaxed his grip on her breast, his touch certain to leave bruises in its receding wake as she traced the perimeter of his mouth, his upper lip sharply bisected by a ridge of thick scar tissue. 

“What can I do?” she murmured and saw the initial confusion flash across his face. 

Bane felt an explosion in his lust, like a dormant volcano blasting after a million years in dormancy as she traced one hand down the front of his body until she could tease the length of his half-hard cock. 

“What can I do?” she asked as her face was overcome by a brilliant blush. 

He felt an invigoration in his nervous system at her seductive combination of abrupt boldness and shy timidity. 

As he shifted Livia around until they were both fully on the bed, far above the Indian Ocean, Bruce and Selina felt a win was on their side when they caught a good tail wind and made even better progress in the multi-million-dollar private jet. 

As Selina reclined the leather seat and closed her eyes, she was jolted from her nap the second she succumbed to needed sleep as turbulence seemed to come out of nowhere and the private jet was sodomized by Mother Nature as the pilot of the jet was notified by the air-traffic controller that they would need to make an emergency landing at the closest country.

As Selina and Bruce tightened their seatbelts and prayed to their collective gods, back on solid ground, billionaire Bryce settled behind his huge desk and navigated the dark web. He composed a message, wrapped in another message, and hovered over send as he had this sudden colon-clenching thought that Bane would know the moment he sent the message out in the dark web turbulent seas. Bryce was immediately unsure if he should send the email about tracking down the man who was so intimate with the darkness, ensuring no one could escape his probing gaze or find a hiding spot on the planet. 

As Bryce spared his father’s permanent stern expression another glance before sending the encrypted and camouflaged message, back in the cash-only hotel, Bane took his attention off Livia just long enough to aim the remote at the television and turn it off. He didn’t want to hear anything except the gasps and moans he made spill from between her lips. 

Bane immediately grabbed her left hand after he dropped the remote. He lifted it and pressed his lips to her ringed finger. “Say yes,” he murmured.

He didn’t give her a chance to answer before he crashed his lips into hers and swallowed her breath as he hurriedly sank his hard cock inside her tight wetness until their intimate flesh kissed.

“Please say yes,” he begged when he lifted his lips, the assertive pumping of his hips making her gasp on the end of each deep thrust. 

Livia was only capable of nodding as he filled her entirely. 

As Bane’s lustful enthusiasm didn’t allow him to wait too long before succumbing to orgasmic bliss, back at the front door of the spacious suite, Blake blew out a sharp breath and kicked open the door. Logano followed soon after at the rear slider.

They both only discovered each other in the otherwise unoccupied suite.

“What the fuck?” Blake shouted and punched the wall when his eyes found the destroyed phone. 

He shouted as a couple of the tiny bones in his hand fractured upon contact with the textured drywall. 

Logano and Blake looked around a little longer before making their way to the front desk. Their footfalls were quiet as they walked through the sprawling Tuscan tiled lobby. 

They talked to the desk staff and their badges and hints of terrorism complicity charges eventually opened the door to the security office where they reviewed the parking lot footage. 

Blake and Logano kept pausing the footage and squinted at the screen as they tried to discern the departing SUV’s license plate. Blake frowned as he watched the presumed captive jewelry store employee climb onto the passenger seat when Bane opened the door for her. 

“She doesn’t look like she’s in much distress, does she?” Logano asked with a side-long glance at Blake. 

After Blake and Logano made some notes from the footage, the hotel manager offered them a complimentary night in one of the junior suites if they kept the prestigious hotel out of the news and any association with terrorism. 

Blake made a side trip to the ice machine to settle down his swelling hand as Logano fetched Nabokov and the backpacks. As the trio of men settled into the roomy suite, hours away in the dilapidated hotel, the only sounds in the ramshackle room, were Bane and Livia collectively catching their breaths. 

Livia shivered in his arms and concern etched his features, “are you okay?”

She nodded, “it’s a little cold.”

Bane chuckled as he slipped his mask back into place and reluctantly pulled the bedspread around her naked skin. “Most people don’t notice the temperature when they check into a place like this.”

As he slipped from the tangled linen and tried to get the heater to turn on, back in Barsad’s Mercy ICU room, Jenifer leaned over his bedrail, raptly intent on every word that slipped from between his lips.

“I can’t stay here much longer,” Barsad added in a rush. “Gotham PD could connect me to Bane any day and then I’m bound for the electric chair, no one is going to intercede in my prison transfer.”

Jenifer frowned, unsure if there was a question in there. She looked down when Barsad lifted his hand to close around hers. “Help me get out of here.”

“You’re in no way stable to go on the run,” she said but didn’t pull her hand away.

“You could take care of me, take me to your home.”

“My home?” she scoffed and laughed loudly before she saw he was serious. “I can’t bring you to my house.”

“Why not, is there a husband there?” he asked softly.

“No, it’s a home with a mortgage paid by my alimony,” she said before adding. “I don’t even know how I’d get you out of here and I don’t have this kind of medical equipment in my spare bedroom.”

“You said I was improving,” he stated. “Do I need all of this?”

Jenifer considered his words; he was stable and was due to be transferred to a regular hospital room at the end of the week. She had been upset to hear that he would be gone when she got back from her mini vacation over the Thanksgiving holiday and she’d have to find good reasons to see him. 

His admission to being an accomplice to Bane’s destruction of the city was frightening but he didn’t invoke fear within her.

“I can’t answer that, would you want to risk dying? I don’t know if I even want to consider what you’re saying and the chance of you dying at my home.”

“I promise I won’t hold you responsible,” he said with a lopsided grin and squeezed her hand tighter.

As Jenifer covered her mouth and barely suppressed a rare girlish giggle, back in the airy junior suite, Blake stretched out on one of the king-sized beds as Nabokov elevated his leg on the sofa in the living area. Logano stayed in the shower until his fingertips resembled prunes. The men ordered thick bloody rare steaks, butter drenched lobster tails and a pile of steamed broccoli from room service, no continued charges per management meant the men poached the mini bar until it was Prohibition Era dry and dozed heavily under the down comforters and Merino wool afghans. 

As the moon rose, it saw all and looked down on the vigilante officers as they all slept with full bellies and intoxicated blood streams. The pitted lunar surface observed Livia asleep in Bane’s warm embrace, wrapped up tightly in the formidable circle of his arms. The magnesium compounds elements in the moon’s crust watched Gordon hang his jacket in the hallway closet of his split-level home and eat cold barbecued chicken legs without turning on the overhead kitchen lights. 

The moon shone into the billionaire Bryce’s penthouse bedroom where a well-paid natural redhead slept next to him, wearing just her lacy thong and one thigh-high stocking. Moonbeams danced over downtown Gotham into Barsad’s ICU room as Jenifer prepared to leave for the evening, due back the following afternoon. Before Jenifer changed and drove home, she loitered by the supply room and pilfered some syringes and emergency medications that she shoved deep in her scrub pants pockets. 

As Livia snored softly in Bane’s arms, he stared at the closed curtains of the shitty room and thought about the thousands of nights he slept on the hardpacked dirt at the bottom of The Pit. He closed his eyes as his lungs tried to remember the sensation of every breath tainted with dirt and he felt a cough threaten to sound and wake her up.

He managed to keep from making too much noise and after hours of listening to Livia’s breath come deep and even, fell into a sleep that was plagued with nightmares and infected his very cerebrospinal fluid. 

Livia stirred awake at the sound of Bane’s guttural moaning he made trapped in his nightmare. 

In the toxic jungle of his head, Bane was plagued with dark visions and violent imagery of Livia being beaten. He sounded louder each time he saw a different outcome of Livia being shoved into the vault and incinerated with the rest. Each time we saw her death, the ending was more disturbingly fatal and detailed. He didn’t hold her close and instead watched her perish in front of him, each time more gratuitous than the time before. 

He was helpless and unable to defend himself while he traversed the world of dreams. Livia shifted when his barely decipherable words took on more flesh and she realized he was pleading repetitively, “don’t, don’t leave me.”

Livia sat up as she watched sweat blossom on his bare skin. Bane muttered and thrashed under the linen before she started whispering to him and squeezing the tops   
of his shoulders. “Shhhh, you’re okay,” she murmured as he slowly swam to consciousness. 

He rubbed his face as Livia quickly skipped to the bathroom to soak and wring out a washcloth. “It’s okay,” she murmured as she moved the damp fabric against the heated skin of his forehead. She smoothed the cloth down his neck and across the bare flesh of his broad chest. Livia refolded the fabric into a rectangular shape and moved the cool cloth across his flushed skin.

He fully woke up under her gentle touch as she moved the damp fabric over his face and neck, in the moonlit room she could barely make out his features. But she clearly recognized the sound of grief and pain in his words. 

“You were dreaming, you’re okay,” Livia whispered and smoothed the damp cloth across his cheekbones. 

Bane blinked his eyes and stared up at her as she continued to move the cloth in a gentle path down his neck, “you’re okay.”

Livia recalled his earlier vulnerable admission and rested her palm over his heart. He lifted a hand and covered hers where it laid against his taut skin. 

“Is it okay?” he asked hoarsely as his hands smoothed across her body, seeking the comfort of her bare skin.

Livia closed her eyes when he slid down in the bed and wrapped his arms around the middle of her body. She settled her hands on the tops of his shoulders as he pressed the side of his face against her chest and the top of her belly.

“What were you dreaming about?” she whispered as he wordlessly squeezed her until her breath threatened to leave her lungs.

“I don’t dream, unchecked, the night plagues me. My body’s physical needs for rest eventually overwhelms my mental resolve to avoid prolonged states of sleep.”


	12. Under the Sun

“Tell me what tortures your mind?” Livia whispered as he readjusted his grip around her mid-section and pushed his face into the supple bare skin of her belly, his exhale still hot against her skin after it was filtered through the mesh front of his titanium mask. 

Bane was silent so long, Livia thought he might’ve fallen back to sleep from where he was tightly molded against her. 

His tone when he finally began to speak, was in a voice that was crudely formed in the shadows, a gravelly pitch that was used to communicate with human lives woven into the living landscapes of the shadows. Bane could discern the primordial voices that oozed their threats from the inky blackness when the sun abandoned the sky over Pena Dura and his world was blanketed in the night with cacti barbs and rows of serrated teeth.

Livia kept her hands keep moving in soothing circles along his bare skin as he continued in a hoarse timbre as he told her about Talia, about protecting her and watching her depart from his view for the last time. He described his brief adulations that she was going destroy the city and he was going to draw and quarter the bat, delve to childish pleasures and jump rope with his affluent entrails. 

Livia murmured soft incoherent sounds to him as his grip turned painful when he admitted what those federal officers had said of Talia’s posthumous corpse and the helplessness that had leeched into his limbs.

“It’s okay,” she murmured as he slid his hands down to rest on her hips and massaged the supple flesh as he squeezed his eyes shut, wanting to shake his head to rid the horrific images from assaulting him.

“Is it?” he thought and smoothed one hand up her side to cup her breast. “She knows nothing of the darkness,” Bane thought as he squeezed her tender flesh until she gasped in his arms. 

“Is it okay?” he asked raggedly as he shifted until she was on her back and he could insinuate himself in between her thighs. 

“It could be, it might be an adjustment process for you,” she said with a chuckle.

“How so?”

“Well, you can’t expect me to adopt some kind of criminal life?”

“Do you expect me to enroll for my GED and take swim classes at the Y?” he asked in a solemn tone as he pushed her thighs further apart.

Livia would’ve laughed at the idea of him at the local swim center but lost the ability to breathe as his hardness was suddenly pressing against the soft skin on the inside of her thigh.

“Of course not, what’s your expectation of the future?” she managed.

“You mean our future?” he asked and teased the head of his sensitive cock against her even more sensitive clit. 

Livia nodded as Bane continued, making her rhythmically gasp with his touch as he growled lowly.

“We’ll put Gotham City behind us, find somewhere far away and get a house, start a new life together.”

Livia pressed her lips together as he waited for her to say something. In the void of her words, he never stopped teasing the head of his cock in painfully slow circles around her hardening clit, making her thighs shake.

“Far away from here?” she said between gasps as her bliss nearly overflow and he nodded. 

“Will you stop being a criminal and stop killing people?” she managed before her body succumbed to his intimate touch and she broke out in goose bumps as an orgasmic wave hitched a ride on her central nervous system, starting at the crown of her head and riding down to the tip of her left baby toe. 

“What would you have me do?” he asked roughly as he bathed in the gasps that accompanied the feeling of her body shuddering underneath him.

“What if I wanted to have bees and sell the honey at a local farmer’s market and make our own soap for fun and holiday gifts?” she managed to coherently pull off as he   
grew painfully silent but the press of his rigidity never lost its firm enthusiasm as he considered her words. 

“No more guns or crime?” he finally asked in an unreadable tone.

“Just a shotgun by the backdoor to scare off any bears thar might get too close, I want to live far from the city.”

“You know I have to finish what was started?” he said as he slid his cock up and down her wet folds. 

Livia nodded as he continued. 

“There will be a lot more death and blood shed,” he admitted, no regret in his voice, just fact.

“I know,” she said and let her thighs fall further apart underneath him. “But no more after we leave Gotham?” she added.

“I swear it’ll be the last,” he vowed hoarsely and roughly plunged inside her, filling her rapidly as he dropped his face to the warm curve of her neck. He inhaled as much of her intoxicating scent as he could through his mask.

“We’ll grow, farm or care for whatever you want on this out-of-town spot,” he groaned as he leaned back and adjusted his hands so he could look down at her face the end each time their intimate flesh kissed. 

As he neared his own orgasmic bliss, hours away, the beginning streams of sunlight began to move across the lush hotel’s suite, it first landed on an empty bottle of discarded booze before finding Blake’s sleeping face. 

He groaned as he snorted hard and coughed loudly, clearing his throat of sticky greenish phlegm that he spit in the sink before taking a marathon long piss.

Blake washed his hands with the boutique lavender liquid soap before he heard the muffled ring of his phone in his discarded clothes strewn around the airy suite. 

He wiped his hand on the soft obscenely high thread counts as he dug through the pile of clothes on the floor until he managed to answer the private call, before it went to voicemail. 

The billionaire Bryce’s caviar rich words greeted Blake’s inner ear. “Is the Sergeant Wiggins?”

Blake smirked and swallowed back his chuckle, “yes, this is Sergeant Wallace.”

“Sergeant Washington this is Bryce Langdon, we spoke earlier.”

“Yes Mr. Langdon and I’m still waiting for the ten percent deposit, after midnight it’ll be twenty percent.”

“I’ll give you fifty, I just need you to listen Sergeant Wallace.”

“I’m listening.”

“Some of my ‘acquaintances’ came through, I just need to provide some specifics and a lot of dollars and I could tell you where that masked man is within ten feet of currency.”

“So ,what’s the problem, pay them and give me the address.”

“They want a lot of money and you want a lot of money and it’s turning out to be more than I budgeted for.”

“Well I’d figure it the fuck out Bryce, sell a child, a presidency whatever. Get me Bane’s goddamn location.”

Bryce was silent so long, Blake thought he had hung up.

“Are you there Mr. Langdon,” reverting back to untouchable professionalism. 

“Yes.”

Blake was certain Bryce was crying and felt the same stab in his belly when he saw a woman cry. 

“Tell you what Mr. Langdon, how about fifteen total?”

Bryce sniffed hard, “really?”

Blake smiled, “yes, you seem like you’re under a lot of pressure and at the end of the day I want to preserve justice. Get me the address and call me back at this   
number,” Blake said and ended the call before Bryce could make a peep. 

As Bryce dabbed at the corner of his eyes with the edge of his silk pillowcase, closer to the center of Gotham City, Commissioner Gordon startled awake when his wife dropped the newspaper in front of him.

He blinked rapidly and looked around the well-lit kitchen, he had fallen asleep at the table, chicken bits still on the tips of his fingers. 

Gordon watched his wife set a full mug of black coffee on the table in front of him and a dishtowel for his hands. 

“Another busy night?” she murmured as she gave him a chaste peck on the cheek before bustling around and making them both cheesy omelets.

“Sorry,” he murmured as he swept up the graphic crime scenes photos and took a few gulps of the piping hot French roast. 

Sara Gordon mumbled an understandable sound as she pivoted from the stove and topped off his chipped ceramic mug. 

“Will you be home by 6 this evening, we have dinner reservations with Bobby and Terri.”

Gordon grumbled and slugged back more the bitter brew before Sara laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Jim, you have not gotten home before midnight for almost a week, you will be home by 5:30 so you can spend a few minutes talking to your wife.”

Gordon set down his mug and patted her hand. “I shall see you no later than five, but Bobby better keep his opinions to himself, I don’t want to argue about the EU again before we can even order coffee and dessert.”

Sara smiled down at him and smoothed back his rumpled hair. “I’m sure you can endure Bobby and his antics for the evening dear,” she said before she turned her attention back to the bits of onions and ham that popped and sizzled in the oil-coated frying pan. 

As the sun filtered through the thin nicotine stained curtains, there came a rapid knocking at the deadbolted and chained door. 

Livia stiffened as Bane whispered to her in assuring tones. “I’m expecting someone, don’t be afraid,” he murmured as she flinched at the next series of knocking.

“She’s fragile and needs me in a way Talia never did,” he thought to himself as he moved away from her and pulled on his clothes as fast as a five-alarm responding firefighter.

Bane cast a look at her before he opened the door, the thin sheets wrapped around her warm nakedness, longing to be with her, next to her, buried inside her. 

After Bane had a succinct conversation with the pock-marked kid, they exchanged fat envelopes.

One envelope was 9x12 and contained two new sets of identifications from insurance cards to driver’s licenses and membership cards to a wholesale warehouse store. 

The other envelope was legal-sized and bursting with rubber-banded one hundred-dollar bills. 

Livia’s eyes were only for the envelope when Bane turned from the door and returned to the bed. 

“Will you show me what’s in there?” she asked and pulled the sheet tighter around her upper body.

“Will you wear that ring and never take it off?”

Livia nodded and Bane held her eyes trapped in his heavy gaze as he upended the manila envelope onto the surface of the bed.

Livia blinked rapidly and had to force her eyes away from his and down to the pile of papers in front of her. 

Bane watched her paw through the papers and look at their new passports and identification cards. She let her eyes linger on the Certificate of Marriage before   
nervously clearing her throat. 

Bane smiled behind his mask as she stacked the paperwork and returned it to the envelope. “Thank you,” she finally said after she raised her eyes to meet his. 

He felt bile crawl up his throat at the further risk he was subjecting her to, in the wake of his fear he made the indelibly concrete decision that the ring on her finger was never going anywhere but her finger and that she was never going to be out of his sight unless she had to use the bathroom and that would be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. 

“May I join you?” Bane asked raggedly and began slipping out of his clothes. 

As Livia nodded and he continued removed every last article of clothing before joining her under the covers, back at the tiny tropical island where Bruce and Selina were holed up, they both gave sighs of relief when word came through that they could get back in the air. 

They wasted no time in getting the small crew together and off the runway, not catching the jet stream this time but still managing a good pace of more than six-hundred miles-per-hour.

Over the next twelve hours, the entire chess board was upended, and all the marbles rolled away and were lost forever under the sofa.

As the time passed, Bruce and Selina moved through the airspace and eventually landed at the Gotham City international airport and were met by a Cadillac that drove them to Wayne Enterprises where Lucius Fox was waiting in the remains of Applied Sciences. 

As the hours passed, Blake received a call back from the billionaire who provided several credited sightings of Bane and his female hostage.*

Logano typed the last known coordinates into the vehicle’s GPS system as Blake navigated the bulky SUV back on the interstate and where the female’s electronic voice directed.

As Blake and the officers headed towards the last confirmed sighting of Bane, he was currently at the shitty hotel, loading the last of their supplies in another commandeered car and headed out after she slipped into a warmer coat with the crisp winter bite in the air.

Before Bane got in the car, he gestured towards the young valet with a band-aid over his eyebrow and nose piercing, the jewelry might offend the highfalutin guests.   
The eager youth bobbed his head and asked how he could help a customer.

Bane pressed a thick goose egg-sized roll of bills into the kid’s hand along with the phone number to his burner phone. He told him to call if anyone came sniffing around and to hop in a car and follow them with the promise of ten times the amount of money. 

The kid couldn’t agree fast enough, he was not athletic in the slightest and this made him suddenly feel like a soldier-of-fortune. 

Bane cranked the heater until Livia couldn’t see her breath in the car anymore and headed on the first planned leg of their long drive to their permanent mailing address. 

As the hours passes, Jenifer went home, had a microwave entrée and bottle of white wine as she considered Barsad’s words. She passed out on the futon in her spare bedroom as she tried to visualize where she would put his IV pole. 

For a while everyone was in their own reality, their lives were all due to collide violently in the near future, but for now, reality was only what everyone could see with their own eyes.


	13. Preferences

Selina only had eyes for the news report that kept replaying the jewelry store heist footage and flashed the images of the victims. She didn’t realize Fox was speaking to her until Bruce gently squeezed her shoulder.

She muttered a poor apology and looked over the crime scene photos as Fox detailed how he had also tracked and pinpointed the varying license plates Bane was sighted in just as Logano had done.

Bruce was excited despite the situation as Fox produced some of the few remaining weapons that hadn’t been poached from Applied Sciences.

Fox showed Bruce and Selina the last known sighting of Bane on a map before walking them to a no-flat tire having, dual exhaust boasting, modified Hemi Hellcat with more than 1200 horses. Bruce could’ve dry humped the transmission at the sight of the pistons. 

As Fox pointed out the finer details to a distracted Selina, hours away Bane felt fatigue begin to pull at him from every physical and cellular aspect. He didn’t realize he had groaned his frustration aloud in the quiet car until she spoke. 

“What’s wrong?” she immediately asked. 

“I’m tired,” he admitted. “But, there’s no real place that has a rest stop for a few more hours.”

“I can drive.”

Bane tightened his grip on the steering wheel. How did he tell her that he didn’t even want sleep to keep them apart. 

“Is that such a bad idea?” she asked with a trace of anger to her words when he remained silent. 

“No,” he said and laid a hand on top of her thigh, squeezing lightly as he added. “I simply prefer something else.”

Livia blinked at him as he stared out over the hood. “So, your preferences are written in stone?”

“Yes,” he thought but knew he couldn’t say as such. “No,” he finally said after too long of a pause. 

“There is a lot at stake, I have a large target on my back, and you could get hurt which would upset me.”

Livia nodded and cleared her throat as Bane switched on the high beams and turned into a state park with a self-check-in envelope and vehicle tag system.

“Which state park is this?”

Bane listed a park name that Livia was vaguely familiar with and squinted into the dark as Bane navigated the sturdy SUV to an available campsite complete with a picnic table and charcoal grill. 

“Is there a tent in here?” Livia asked and looked over her shoulder at the empty second row seat. 

“No, all the seats go flat, and I snagged the linen from the last room.”

“Is it safe?”

“Yes,” he said pulled the SUV to a stop and left the engine and interior lights on as he opened multiple doors and the rear farm style doors. He declined all her offers to help and suggested she have a snack while he prepped the rear of the large vehicle. 

Livia reluctantly snacked on an assortment of some chocolate-covered fruit and nuts while she watched the large muscles of his chest flex as he moved around the vehicle. 

She found her eyes becoming laser focused on a raised artery that pressed under his golden skin. She let her eyes dance the length and varying intersection of the artery and traced it up the musculature striations of his neck. 

Livia flicked her eyes up to his and found him already looking at her. She swallowed hard, a flush came over her, red and rapid as he caught her staring. 

He smiled behind his mask and decided to keep this moment tucked away until later. “The bathrooms are close by.”

Livia cleared her throat, “the bathroom would be great,” she mumbled lamely.

As Bane escorted Livia to the rudimentary bathrooms before heading back to the SUV with the makeshift backseat sleeping quarters, on the interstate headed in their direction, still hours away, Logano was now driving as Blake dozed in the passenger seat. Nabokov was still laying down in the backseat with his leg elevated. 

Logano had a hit on the SUV’s license plate that Bane was driving and following the updated coordinates from the tracking equipment he had harvested from Applied Sciences.

As they continued with the flow of traffic, deciding it wasn’t worth the risk of getting pulled over for speeding, back at the campsite and SUV turned tent, Livia put the pillows in a different order, eager to have herself distracted when he pulled the rear doors closed, cracked the windows and depressed the automatic locks. 

“Don’t be afraid,” he murmured as he sat across from her and pushed a pillow under his lower back. 

“Of you or the campsite?” she asked with a nervous chuckle. 

Bane smiled behind his mask, the visible parts of his face didn’t show much emotion and Livia felt a flash of fear that she might’ve invoked anger.

He felt the rise of her fear as he returned her gaze, witnessed the birth of terror in her eyes and saw her shoulders tense and her hands clench on the stolen high thread count linen. 

“Both,” he said lowly and pulled his mask free and took in a few breaths, he felt a trill of desire when the heady sweet scent of her fear tickled his exposed senses. 

“I can’t,” she stammered when he started to yank her pants free.

“Can’t or won’t?” he growled and used more force.

“I’m sore,” she admitted.

Bane paused his hands, the nearly too sweet and almost rotten scent of her fear remained in the air and seemed to be stuck inside his nose. He started to have a had a hard time controlling his hands from ripping her remaining clothes free until she was naked under his hands. 

“That’s easily remedied,” he groaned on a rasp as he roughly flipped her over and yanked at her hips until she was on her knees and elbows. He paused his hands on her body to put a pillow between her head and the side of the SUV door. 

“What were you thinking about when you were looking at me earlier?” he asked on a strained husky whisper.

Livia shifted as much as his formidable embrace would allow, feeling like she was being swallowed in his masculine musculature and warmth. 

“Is this another example of your preference reigning supreme?” she managed as he smoothed his palm up the length of her spine to rest between her shoulder blades. 

He could feel the knobs of her spinal column trembling under his rough fingertips. 

This time he didn’t bother pretending and used his free hand to pull his hardening cock from his pants. 

He spit on the palm of his hand and stroked the length of his rapidly hardening rigidity. 

“Yes,” he grunted as he pushed himself inside her tight rear opening. He thrust too fast and forced a painful cry from her. 

Bane leaned over her, their bare skin touching where it could as he pressed his lips against her bare back. He felt her body’s tightness shift in his hands as her breathing began to even out. He pressed his lips in an upward pattern along the protruding wing of her shoulder blade as he moved in a gentler rhythm in and out of her tightness. 

“There’s no room here for fear,” he grunted as he varied his rhythm until she was gasping every time their intimate flesh kissed. 

As Livia struggled for words Bane was expecting, back in the heart of Gotham City in Barsad’s ICU room, Jenifer closed the door to start her rounds and check his vitals. 

She adjusted the nylon blood pressure cuff and pressed a few buttons on the HD monitor and waited as the cuff tightened before she spoke lowly. 

“So, your plan is that I smuggle you out of here, nurse you back to health and then you what? Just leave?”

“Name your price and I’ll do just that,” Barsad lowly and before Jenifer could process, he reached out and grabbed her closest hand, squeezing gently. “I had a different kind of plan I was going to run by you.”

“What’s your plan?” she asked with nervous hesitation.

“Most of what you said is what I had in mind, but once I’ve recuperated enough to function, I’d like to stay. With you,” he added. 

“Stay?”

Barsad nodded, the conversation and nerves had exhausted him, he closed his eyes and released her hand. Jenifer laid her cool palm on his forehead. “I’ve been told   
I’m impossible to live with,” she murmured with a low chuckle. 

Barsad summoned enough strength to open his eyes. “You could turn into a fire-breathing dragon with four heads and as long as you promise to never stop touching me, I’ll deal with absolutely anything.”

Jenifer chuckled, “nothing that terrifying. More in the vein of, put the dirty clothes in the hamper, flush the toilet, keep your piss in the toilet to start.”

Barsad smiled and drifted into a fatigued sleep. Jenifer recorded his current vitals and went about checking her other patients. His words bounced around inside her head. 

“My vacation is in two days,” she thought as she suctioned out a tracheotomy and made small talk with a patient’s visiting niece from abroad. 

“Thanksgiving is in two days and you were going to be alone, but you could change that,” she thought as she exchanged a silicone catheter and adjusted the pillows behind a new post-surgical admit. 

As Jenifer continued to weigh the pros and cons of knowingly aiding and abetting a criminal should he be found out, hours and hours away Blake and his two pals walked into the opulent lobby of the hotel that Bane and Livia had departed from earlier. 

The valet who had to cover his piercings, tattoos and not wear eyeliner eavesdropped as Blake and company spoke with the hotel manager about the guests in one of the suites. 

The kid noted the car Blake and friends were driving and the time they left. Blake and friends didn’t need much more information and after accessing the security footage began the process of searching for the license plate from the grainy screen. 

He waited until his break to call Bane on the burner phone, the call took a long time to connect and rang as Bane was curled around Livia and preparing to get a few hours of sleep. 

Bane answered after the third ring and thanked the youth for calling. 

He ended the call and began pulling his clothes back on.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“Someone from the hotel, these cops, marshals or some other group has been following us and know this car. I’m going to disable the GPS and then we have to get out of here fast and get another car.”

“You’re exhausted though.”

“It’s okay, it’ll just be a few more hours. You may rest if you want.”

“I don’t need to, let me drive and you can sleep. I can get on the interstate and drive straight.”

“No,” he said in a tone that shut down compromise.

“You’ll suffer to maintain complete control,” she murmured and pulled the blanket tight around her shoulders.

“Yes,” he growled and moved with ferocious speed and yanked her into her arms and forcefully ripped the smooth linen free to expose her bare skin. He cut off her   
words as he crushed his mouth against hers, his tongue darting between her lips. 

Livia let herself be wrapped up in his powerful embrace and he felt a lot of fight drain from her as he crushed her to his chest.

As Livia surrendered something in her wordless sighs and moans, Bane returned a wordless oath of loyalty, love, and protection, back in the Wayne Enterprise Building, Fox watched Bruce and Selina depart in the industrial vehicle, their signal was locked on where Bane had already disabled the GPS and was traveling at an incredible speed towards the nearest large parking lot. 

As Bruce and Selina discussed how they’d neutralize Bane once and for all, Bane found a different car that would better suit their needs. He hotwired the larger SUV and navigated back to the interstate and to a well-traveled and popular hotel chain. 

By the time they reached the new hotel, fatigue had found Livia also. She aided her sleep with a few small bottles of overpriced liquor from the minibar.

As Bruce pressed the accelerator to the floor, Selina closed her eyes and leaned her head back as she imagined Bane’s head on a spike, Bane slid under the covers and flicked off the bedside lamp. 

Sleep was generous as it washed over them. Livia was curled up in Bane’s powerful embrace and together they slept, dreamless and oblivious to the outside moving world. 

As they slept, Bruce and Selina tracked the brief campsite signal, as did Blake and pals. As Bane curled his arms around her in unshakable protection, so many people converged on a false X on a map, ready to dig for nonexistent hidden treasure. 

Bane was able to sleep without worry knowing everyone was looking up at the sky while he eviscerated them and stole their wallets. 

As the many people drew closer to the now inaccurate GPS coordinates, back in the heart of Gotham City, Gordon tried to stop fidgeting with the napkin as he sat with his wife and neighbors Terri and Bobby.

Sara squeezed his hand, saying so much in that grasp. He understood she categorically wanted to enjoy her time at the restaurant featuring a Culinary TV celebrity chef. 

On the car ride home, Sara reached over and patted the top of his thigh. “I think you should go solve the crime so I can have my husband back.”

Gordon chuckled and made a sharp right turn. 

“Jim, what are you doing?”

“Ice cream. Let’s get a cone Sara, I’ll probably have to do some traveling,” he said as he pulled into a popular ice cream parlor. 

Sara grew quiet and eventually nodded. She looked at Gordon, her eyes shimmering with unshed tears. “As long as this is the last case Jim. My heart can’t take the worry anymore.”

Gordon reached out and grabbed her hand and pressed his lips to her palm. “This is the last case Sara, the last one I promise,” he murmured when he lifted his lips.


	14. Doctor's Orders

Bane awoke first under the layers of linen on the lumpy hotel bed. Livia snored softly and he carefully slid from under the covers to keep from waking her. 

He checked his burner phone for any messages and frowned finding it devoid of any kind of communication. 

As Bane cleaned up and ordered her a breakfast tray for when she woke up. He wanted to put a lot more miles between them and their pursuers while he formulated a counterattack. 

He dried his face and assessed his reflection. “Is it worth the risk?” he asked himself as he ran the towel along the random drops of water on his neck. 

“Is what worth the risk?

Bane looked over his shoulder and found Livia leaning against the door jamb.

“Is what?” she repeated when he didn’t answer.

He sighed and set the towel down. As he did, he knocked the plastic hairbrush into the sink. 

“Come here,” he said and held his hand out.

“Will you answer me if I do?”

He nodded as she let him grasp her hand and pull her close. He dropped his hands to her hips and made her face the mirror as he retrieved the brush from where it had clattered into the ceramic sink. 

Livia held his eyes in the mirror’s reflection as he began brushing her hair, he began murmuring in between long strokes of her silken fall of hair, her strands snagged on his ragged cuticles.

“I’m at a crossroads with the people pursuing us.”

“What are your choices?”

He smoothed the brush from the crown of her head to the end of her box-dyed strands before he answered.

“We keep going, driving until I find a safe place for us.”

“Or?” she prompted.

“Or, I make sure you’re safe and then I kill them all.”

As Livia considered the vast spectral ends of his decision, Blake and company pulled over at a truck stop that had semi-functional bathrooms and passable food. 

As they chowed down on crispy bacon slices glistening with fat and sliced into sunny yellow egg yolks and washed it all down with a wash of bitter black coffee, Selina   
and Bruce also pulled over for a break. 

They chose a bohemian coffee shop with granulated raw sugar for their organic coffee blends and gluten-free blueberry muffins sweetened with agave.

As the pursuing parties all ingested caffeine and carbohydrates in their own way, back in the heart of Gotham City at the police station, Gordon squinted at a DMV printout of the most recent vehicle sighting that Bane was driving with his hostage/not hostage. 

He looked at a picture of Sara in a silver frame on the corner of his desk. “This is the last case,” he murmured to her photo and stopped at the gas station before heading in the direction of the last known sighting of Bane. 

Back in the hotel, Livia was saved from formulating a coherent reply when three sharp knocks came at the hotel door. Her eyes got large for a moment and he smoothed her hair away from her neck so he could press his lips above her pounding carotid artery. 

“That’s your breakfast.”

She couldn’t help but smile and give a relieved chuckle when the three knocks sounded again at the door. 

Bane left her to finish cleaning up as he set out the plate and utensils on the small kitchenette counter and poured her a mug of near-scalding Italian roast coffee. 

“Thank you,” she said with more enthusiasm than she intended and quickly stammered. “I really need coffee.”

As Bane continued to watch Livia eat, back in Barsad’s Gotham City ICU hospital room, Jenifer went to the nurse’s station and made some updates to a few charts as she created a phony doctor’s order for a follow-up CT scan for Barsad.

She went to her shift manager and said she was feeling a little nauseated and it was probably just her approaching period, but it was a slow day and she’d like to go home instead of powering through the rest of her shift.

The nurse manager looked at the coverage and told her to feel better soon and wished her an early Happy Thanksgiving. 

Jenifer changed into a pair of scrubs in the deep red color of the radiology department after leaving the ICU department. 

Jenifer waited in the radiology department hallway as Barsad was wheeled by. She had slipped on a doctor’s coat and convinced the chubby high school volunteer   
student who was pushing Barsad’s wheelchair to let her take over from there.

She fished in her coat and found her hospital café card with a little more than ten dollars remaining on it. “They have chocolate cheesecake today; you should totally try it.”

The kid nodded dumbly and toddled off, eager to not have to work and instead eat. 

Doctor’s orders.

Jenifer watched the high school girl walk away before she looked down at Barsad who had still not spoken. 

“I hope you like turkey, some people were supposed to come over, but their plans changed and there’ll be a lot of food.”

Barsad reached up and grasped her hand. “Thank you,” he murmured as she changed out of the doctor’s coat and wheeled him out to her luxury sedan via the freight elevator.

She clicked her key fob twice until the door locks opened. She locked the wheelchair and helped Barsad stand to pivot into the front seat. 

As Barsad rose to his full height, he towered over her and even in his deconditioned state, he exuded wiry strength. He kept his hands clenched onto her forearms for balance before he ran his palms up the outside of her arms, over the curve of her shoulders and gently squeezed as he whispered. 

“Thank you,” he murmured as he leaned down and closed the distance between them to chastely brush his lips against hers. 

“Let me get you out of the parking garage at least before you thank me,” she said nervously and helped him into the car. She felt her chest tighten as she leaned over   
him to help buckle his seat belt. Barsad felt an explosion of spontaneity overtake him as he leaned forward and pressed his lips to the exposed skin of her neck as she adjusted his IV lines. 

She froze and turned towards him, their faces inches apart. As Jenifer searched for her words amidst her rush of emotions, back in the hotel, Bane watched Livia drain her coffee mug and pick apart a cinnamon roll before he spoke. 

“What would you think if I didn’t neutralize our pursuers?”

“It seems safer,” she finally said.

“There is no honor in taking the safe path,” he said sharper than he intended.

Livia shrugged, “I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. It seems smarter to avoid possible danger and death traps.”

He was not used to being able to make his own decisions or hear anything that wasn’t militant rhetoric. 

“The cattle in Gotham City were all killed in part because of my actions, would their ashes say I acted out of stupidity?”

“I didn’t mean to offend,” she said and felt tension fill her when his anger made him seem broader and more formidable than he already was.

Livia nervously fumbled her cinnamon roll and dropped it on her lap. She brushed big sugar crystals off her lap and reached for her napkin to clean off her fingertips and mouth. 

“Wait,” he said and snapped his hand out to close around her wrist as she picked up the napkin. 

“I’m sorry,” he murmured and pulled her hand to his mouth. Livia held her breath as he kissed and darted his tongue against the chunks of sugar crystals that clung to her fingertips. 

“I didn’t mean to scare you, I’m not accustomed to someone who doesn’t value war and honor above all else,” he admitted and pulled her off the bar stool and into his arms. 

She gasped as he lifted her onto the kitchenette counter and pressed his lips to hers, tasting her breath and the sweetness from the sugar dissolved as their lips touched. 

“I never realized there was an alternative to life-taking and battle,” he admitted as he yanked at her oversized nightshirt. 

Bane slid his hands up and down the outside of her thighs before settling his palms on her kneecaps and urging her thighs apart. 

He dropped his head and licked a hot path up the inside of her thigh, moving his mouth closer to her intimate center.

Bane pressed his face to the apex at the top of her thighs and slid his tongue along her wet folds. He had her gasping as he licked her pleasure center until it was a hard pearl under his tongue. Bane felt a deep throb in his balls as Livia undulated her body without shame against his face. 

He kept his profanity inside as he freed his cock, rigidly hard and bobbing with anticipation of sinking into her warm, wet center but coupled with the knowledge that he wouldn’t last long if he slid inside her. 

Livia’s gasp made him grunt against her intimate flesh and he let one of his hands smooth down to his painfully hard cock. Bane stroked himself in time with poking his tongue into her tight, wet opening. He felt his ecstasy building at a rapid rate and flicked his tongue quickly over her hardened center until she cried out as her pleasure overwhelmed her. 

Bane moved his hand at a quicker pace and felt like an overexcited teenager as he came faster than he anticipated, he barely had time to grab one of the breakfast napkins before his orgasm made his knees shake. 

“I don’t want to risk any harm to you,” he grunted as they both caught their breath. 

Bane cupped her face in his large hand and waited until he had her full attention before he rasped. “I don’t want to lose you.”

Livia pressed her palm over his rapidly thudding heart. “You need to do what will make you be able to move forward, to live a life, with me,” she added.

“Tell me what moving forward with you looks like,” he murmured on a heady moan as he brushed his thumb over her lower lip. 

As Livia felt herself flush under his touch, his lips hovering over hers, back in the parking garage of Gotham General, Jenifer opened her mouth to speak and found herself struggling to form coherent words.

“Don’t say anything,” Barsad said suddenly and wrapped her up in his arms as much as his strength and the IV lines would allow, capturing her lips urgently under his. “Let’s go home,” he whispered when he lifted his lips. 

Jenifer nodded and clicked his seatbelt into place before she navigated them out of the rear of the hospital and to her cozy two-bedroom duplex that was half an hour away if traffic was on her side. 

As Jenifer and Barsad drove in silence for a few miles, both getting used to the idea of sharing the same air space, back in their very newest hotel room, Bane brought his free hand to rest on Livia’s hip, waiting for an answer.

“Tell me,” he demanded and dropped his other hand to her hip and squeezed until she gasped. “Tell me what moving forward together looks like.”

“You and I, creating a future together, starting over as one,” she moaned as he kissed her until she was breathless. 

“Before that, I have to kill them all,” Bane admitted on a husky murmur. 

Livia nodded, “I know.”

As Livia showered and changed, Bane located another license plate for the SUV to use once they departed. He had scoped out the surveillance cameras and made his actions occur outside of their filming range capacity.

As Bane and Livia passed the first of many miles on the road, back in the center of Gotham City, Jenifer nervously adjusted the heater vent until warm air blew on their feet.

“Are you feeling okay being upright in the car like that?” she finally asked.

Barsad nodded and managed to suppress a wince as her front tire hit a pothole. 

“I have a pullout sofa downstairs you can rest on; I need to set up the other room upstairs before you get settled there.”

“You have a one-bedroom home?”

“No, it’s two with a postage stamp backyard,” she said oblivious to his meaning. 

“This upstairs room you need to prepare is yours?”

Jenifer opened her mouth to speak, “no, it’s kind of a catch-all room now, I’ve got too much clutter overall,” she said lamely.

“Is your bed too cluttered to share with me?” he asked and looked over at her.

Jenifer could feel the weight of his gaze and she didn’t look over and meet his eyes until she came to a stop at a red light. 

As Barsad watched Jenifer’s pink tongue dart out and moisten her dry lips, hours, and hours away, a meeting of many pursuers was able to happen. 

Blake checked at the front desk and the receptionist was able to confirm the recent sightings of the fearsome masked man and female traveling companion. 

Blake, Logano and a hobbling Nabokov converged on the various entrances and stairwell outside the hotel room. They strained their ears, hearing movement from behind the room’s closed door. The front desk had confirmed that the room had been recently cleaned but not occupied. 

Blake gave a war cry that was equal to the boom at Three-Mile Island and kicked down the door, rushing in with his index finger poised to pull the trigger. Logano kicked in the rear door as Nabokov followed. 

Blake’s rage-filled scream evolved to surprise and then relief when he came face-to-face with the end of a wicked looking titanium firearm, straight out of Applied Sciences and held by Bruce Wayne with an equally armed Selina Kyle in a strong shooting stance next to him.

“You’re alive?!?” Blake shouted with relief and tossed his gun to the ground where it thumped loudly.

The all grown up billionaire orphan locked eyes with the publicly serving orphan. The two men’s neglected souls whispered to each other in a language that could only be heard by the unwanted and discarded. 

Bruce and Blake embraced in that casual male manner that indicated to everyone watching that neither was into sucking dick and very much heterosexual but that they very much missed each other. After a lot of grunting and fist thudding on each other’s backs, there was a sort of an around the room introduction.

If they’d all had sticker name tags affixed over their hearts and holding Styrofoam cups of black coffee, they could’ve all started confessing that they had no power over some combo of alcohol, food, cigarettes, money or fucking. 

Blake and Bruce remained attached at the hip as they set up the hotel room as a command center of sorts. Logano and Selina worked on some NSA level hacking as Nabokov made an inventory of their ammunition. 

The tension peaked from a desolate, lifeless valley to Mt. Everest when scuffling at the door revealed Gordon who had followed a different path of breadcrumbs but bypassed most of the driving by getting his friend with a small Cessna to take him for a quick flight. 

Gordon felt a stab in his heart at seeing Bruce alive and in love with Selina.

As the command center steadily became a smoothly oiled machine and sent out various technological fingers to search for Bane, currently driving hours away in the other direction, Bane passed a slow-moving big rig and looked over as Livia stared out the passenger window, her expression neutral.

“Are you okay?” he asked as he laid his hand on her thigh and gave a gentle squeeze.

She shook her head and half-smiled at him. “Yes, that mattress was uncomfortable, I didn’t sleep well.”

Bane glanced at the center console, “I’d like to drive for a few more hours, will you be able to tolerate that?”

Livia stretched her arms overhead and pointed at an upcoming exit and bright green sign for a popular coffee house chain. “Can we stop and get coffee first?”

Bane wordlessly took the exit and to the coffee house drive-through.

As Livia called out her order from the passenger seat, back in Gotham City, Jenifer pressed the accelerator when the light turned green before she spoke.

“I would hate to fuck things up right away if we hopped into bed too soon,” she said as she entered the gated entrance of her housing community. 

“We can just sleep in your bed for as long as you’d like, I don’t want to be in another room, back by myself,” he admitted and looked out the window, battling a wave a shame. 

Jenifer pulled into her one car garage and cut the engine. She didn’t speak until the door closed and locked them in. “You don’t have any expectations?” she finally asked. 

Barsad turned to her and fumbled for her closest hand. “No, none at all. All I have is gratitude, you saved me from a certain death sentence.”

Jenifer squeezed his hand back before getting out of the car and coming around to his side. It took a bit of time and creativity, but they eventually got up the rear stairs and into her living room. Jenifer helped him elevate his feet, knowing he was in pain by his sudden sweat and wincing. 

She pushed an opiate into his IV line and watched his expression smooth out. Jenifer adjusted some pillows around him and loosened the collar of his still tightly tied hospital gown. She took in a sharp inhale as her index finger and blunt, purple painted nail brushed the hollow of his throat. 

Jenifer looked up and met his sleepy, medicated eyes. “Get some rest,” she murmured and pressed her lips to his clammy forehead before she tucked a quilt around him and finished unloading the car. 

As Barsad napped and Jenifer prepared her room for a makeshift medical setting, continuing to drive, Bane adjusted the rearview mirror and caught Livia with another unreadable expression. 

“Please tell me what’s wrong?” he practically pleaded. 

“It’s nothing,” she said too fast to be believable in any way.

“Talk to me,” he demanded.

“It’s just, it’s stupid, really forget it,” she babbled.

“Talk to me,” he growled in an empty tone and brought his hand back to the top of her thigh and squeezed until she gasped.

“It’s almost Thanksgiving,” she babbled and dropped her hands to his wrist until he loosened his grip as she continued. “I would be shopping and prepping today and now,” she trailed softly.

“Now what?” Bane asked.

“Now I guess it’s a holiday meal from a menu or a room service phone call.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“How so?” she asked and looked over at him, wiping away a tear that had escaped her eye during her swan dive into nostalgia. 

“You can shop, prep, cook and eat.”

“How though? Are you just going to break into an empty house?”

“If need be,” he said simply before he added. “Or I will secure us a home before then.”

Livia watched him, deciding whether his words held water as he added with a quick glance and gentler pat on top of her thigh.

“I’ll take you to a grocery store, buy you whatever you need. I will help you to have a festive meal and day in any way that I can,” Bane vowed. 

Livia nodded and looked away so that he couldn’t see her pleased smile.


	15. Test Results

As the stores became packed everywhere across the United States the closer to Thanksgiving it became, everyone’s shopping list was eventually checked twice and shopping cart overflowing.

Selina and Bruce hosted a huge Thanksgiving Day charity fundraiser for the city of Gotham. Jenifer had bought a lot of groceries early and was glad she did with the sudden upheaval in sharing her bed, home, and life. 

Bane didn’t tell Livia a single detail but one day he stopped at a quaint two-bedroom home with an upgraded kitchen and hardwood floor.

Bane had signed them up for a local grocery store delivery service and everything she said she had needed was waiting for her in the pantry, fridge, and plastic-lined cupboards.

Thanksgiving passed for everyone in a completely different way than anyone was ever accustomed to and soon it was back to planning the hunt for the domestic   
terrorist and captive.

One particularly morning as Livia was pouring a second cup of rich French roast coffee and squinting at the crossword puzzle, Bane gave an audibly surprised tone. 

“What is it?” she asked as he looked down at his phone. 

Every day since he had been free from the hospital, he had messaged Barsad’s burner phone. 

He had sent hundreds of messages so far with nothing in response. He looked down that morning to finally see a reply.

Back in the heart of Gotham City, Jenifer had found the cheap phone in Barsad’s off-pink patient belonging’s bag and charged it to full power.

Barsad had limped to her dresser when he had heard it buzzing earlier that morning. 

Barsad had been beside himself to hear from Bane, he knew after several established cypher codes that Bane was composing the messages. 

Bane looked up as Livia scrambled from the kitchen chair and barely made it to the sink to vomit.

He leapt to his feet. “Are you okay?”

This was the second time she had vomited that week. 

Livia nodded, “it’s those stupid organic sausages, I thought they had a funny taste.” 

Bane nodded as he soaked a washcloth and wiped off her face and neck as he told her that Barsad was a trusted friend and solider and had a place that would provide a safe haven.

“In Gotham?” Livia shouted. “Are you serious? How is that safe?”

“Because,” Bane murmured as he wiped her mouth clean and pressed his lips to her before he added. “Together we will clear up every last Batman Apologist.”

In the same moment that Bane was telling Livia about Barsad, hours away in Gotham City, Barsad was telling Jenifer about Bane.

Jenifer interrupted him. “I remember him clearly; I had a lot of paperwork to fill out with him disappearing like that.”

Barsad tried to give her a masculine disarming smile as he explained that he had offered her house as shelter from the storm.

Jenifer picked up the laundry basket and walked out of the room where Barsad was resting. 

“Wait,” Barsad called and hurried after her as fast as he could as she stomped to the laundry room and packed the machine with a load of cotton towels. She threw in an ocean-scented detergent pod and slammed the lid before turning and addressing Barsad. 

Barsad saw the hurt and betrayal she tried to conceal. “I would’ve appreciated it if you would’ve asked me before you invited a cri…. criminal to my house,” she stammered.

Barsad nodded as Jenifer turned her attention back to the GE washer and hit the cotton cycle. 

He kept her from speaking coherently when he wrapped her up in her arms as she turned back towards him. In her work shoes, their lips were nearly the same level and he crushed his mouth to hers. 

“Oh,” Jenifer managed as Barsad ripped at her basically stitched cotton scrubs. 

“Yes?” Barsad murmured as he urgently clawed her bra free.

“Yes,” Jenifer gasped as she helped him free her pants and simple grey panties as he freed his hardening cock. 

“I owe you everything,” Barsad groaned as he slid inside her eager, wet opening. 

Passion, gratitude, and lust engorged each of his thrusts. “Let me spend my life thanking you,” he growled as he gripped Jenifer’s hips and slammed himself into her, their intimate flesh sounding loudly as it wetly kissed. 

Barsad fucked Jenifer with such enthusiasm that he forced her words to die before they could form. 

As he felt his orgasm approaching too rapidly for his liking, Barsad abruptly pulled his hard cock dripping with her wetness free and roughly spun her around by the hips until he could push her over the front of the vibrating washing machine. 

Jenifer gasped as he slipped the end of his hard cock tentatively at first against her rear opening and after feeling no resistance from her, plunged his entire length up her tight rear opening and rode her until his rhythm became near uneven and he gave a strangled shout as he filled her with his hot, sticky come. 

As Jenifer and Barsad each caught their breaths, hours away in one direction, the hotel turned makeshift command center began up and running again like a smoothly oiled machine between Bruce, Selina, Blake, Nabokov, Logano and Gordon.

Everyone was involved in their own aspect of the investigation.

As Barsad slid his softened cock out of Jenifer and the two of them enjoyed a hot lavender scented bath together, hours in the other direction, Livia and Bane packed for the trip to be reunited with Barsad in the front lines of Gotham City. 

Many hours passed as Jenifer and Barsad eventually made their way upstairs and got to know each other in a less rushed manner. As they shared their bodies and soft sounds, Bane navigated his new to him, stolen and hotwired tan SUV with a creamy beige interior to Gotham. Livia stared out the window and drummed her fingertips on her thighs.

“Are you sure it’s safe to go back there?”

Bane nodded as he reached behind the seat and handed her a ball cap for the home team. “We’ll be able to blend in, there is a free game for the recently rebuilt stadium and election rally for the new mayor.”

“I don’t even like the QB for our team,” she said as she settled the hat on her lap.

“It’ll help us blend in,” he murmured and settled a hand on top of her thigh and squeezed gently. 

Hours passed and Livia napped intermittently, while at the hotel turned command center, Logano scanned traffic surveillance footage for the previously stolen SUV’s tracking. 

As Bruce and Selina whispered with their foreheads nearly touching as they looked at the crime scene photos again, they continued to be certain that they were missing something critical.

As Gordon joined their scrutiny, Bane pulled the tan SUV to a stop in front of Jenifer’s simple home. A bright green wreath with plastic baubles was hung on a short nail on the front door.

Bane knocked in a musical manner and after a few minutes the door opened. Barsad had his hand on the knob and Jenifer was tucked protectively close to his side. 

“You’re looking well brother,” Bane said.

“As are you,” Jenifer snickered and added. “Who’s your friend?”

Bane smiled at Jenifer and closed his hand around Livia’s.

“This is my fiancé Livia Anne James.”

Livia swallowed hard and flushed as she shook Jenifer’s and Barsad’s hands. 

The quartet continued to stare at each other until Jenifer corralled them all inside. “Please come in, I’ve got sparkling water, diet soda and vodka.”

Livia opted for coffee as she slipped out of her coat and boots. Jenifer stared at her until she was uncomfortable as Bane went and unloaded their luggage from the SUV.

“What?” she asked nervously and nearly spilled her coffee as she tried to casually take a sip. 

Neither Jenifer or Livia saw Bane backtrack for his keys and pause when he overheard the two women talking over their sweetened coffee.

“When are you going to tell him?”

“Tell him what?” Livia asked.

“Tell me what?” Bane thought.

“That you’re pregnant of course,” Jenifer said and opened a cellophane wrapped tray of pastries.

“I’m not pregnant,” Livia said shocked.

“Yes, you are, I’m sure of it,” Jenifer said. “I think I have a test in the medicine cabinet,” she added.

“Stop it,” Livia said and waved her off. Jenifer shrugged and went to the living room to bring Barsad some coffee and a blueberry-filled pastry. 

Livia didn’t hear Bane until he was beside her and he closed his hand not unkindly around her upper arm. “Come here,” he whispered urgently and practically dragged her down the hall to the bathroom.

“What is the matter with you?” she mumbled, hoping Jenifer and Barsad didn’t hear them.

“Sit down,” Bane demanded and pointed to the edge of the bathtub. 

Livia dutifully sat and crossed her arms as Bane locked the door and rooted through the medicine cabinet for the early pregnancy test kit.

“You heard that?!?” Livia practically squealed when he turned towards her and her eyes fell on the garishly pink box.

“I’m not pregnant,” she insisted as he wordlessly held the box out towards her.

“Take it,” he said with a casual tone but not extending an invitation for a refusal or bargaining, 

“Fine,” she said as she stood and waited for him to leave. 

“Are you going to leave?”

“No.”

“Can you at least turn around?”

“No.”

Livia felt color fill her face as she squatted over the toilet and peed on the testing strip for five solid seconds before replacing the clear cap and setting it ion the edge of the sink.

Bane stared at his watch for the entire three-minutes of the testing time as she wiped herself off and adjusted her clothes.

She could only stare at his broad back as he remained wordless long after three minutes had to have passed. 

Livia watched Bane palm the test in his large hand and pivot suddenly until he was on his knees in front of her. 

She gasped as his tightened his arms around hers, his hands clawing at her hips and thighs as he wanted no space between them.

“I will take care of all of you,” he murmured as he pushed her shirt up and pressed his lips to her flat belly. Bane’s exhale made Livia shiver, “I will provide a safe world for you and our child.”


	16. A Child

Livia’s knees grew weak and she would’ve crumbled to the floor if not supported within Bane’s formidable arms. 

She rested her hands on his strong shoulders and leaned forward as they both remained in silent, raggedly breathing in tandem until their heart rates returned to normal. 

Bane eventually rose to his feet and cupped her jaw before he dropped his lips to hers and kissed her urgently.

“Let’s get you something extra to eat,” he finally murmured when he lifted his lips and led her back to Jenifer’s cozy kitchen. 

Bane and Barsad settled in the living room as Jenifer made lunch for everyone. 

Livia dipped some crisp carrot sticks into a spicy hummus before she spoke to Jenifer’s back. 

“How did you know?”

Jenifer smiled as she poured herself a mug of steaming French roast. “I worked in obstetrics early in my career, you’re positively glowing. You look like you’re filled with fireflies,” she added as she spooned a few rounded teaspoons of granulated sugar into her coffee. 

As the two women continued to discuss what Livia should expect, in the other room, Bane and Barsad were deep in conversation about the billionaire bat boy and feisty kitten holed up with Chucky Bronson and his renegade coworkers as well as the truly good at heart Jim Gordon. 

Barsad got Bane’s smoldering fury reignited when he revealed the cache of C4 explosives he had secured in a storage facility on the outskirts of Gotham City. 

Barsad was in no condition to drive for a while, let alone operate artillery but he could operate a drone remotely as well as harness and manipulate with the power of wireless internet. 

Bane steepled his fingertips under his chin, “they were willing to die with them, all of them without a perceived flaw in their armor. They shall.”

Both men fell silent when Jenifer and Livia walked in with a few plates loaded with sandwiches, unevenly chopped veggies, and some store-bought cream-filled cookies. 

As the quartet ate, hours away, Bruce and his friends in vengeance, watched the computer run a scan of recent security surveillance footage after tapping into the county’s secure server. 

They had no idea as they watched the computer program perform its search, that Bane and Barsad were actively planning a fiery attack. 

Hours passed as each group discussed various plans of approach and attack. 

Jenifer showed Livia the cramped spare room and narrow futon that would be a tight squeeze for her and Bane. 

Livia didn’t care where she slept as her fatigue grew nearly overwhelming and she succumbed to sleep minutes after laying down.

Jenifer left the door ajar and Livia slept dreamlessly as Bane and Barsad continued to discuss homicidal plans. Jenifer took a quick kitchen inventory and left the men to continue talking as she went to the grocery store.

As Livia heavily napped and Jenifer parked in the brightly lit big box retailer, Bane and Barsad continued freely planning the end all of the pursuers in glorious explosive fire. 

Barsad set his tablet aside and took a few deep breaths, his body was still healing and he’d more than pushed his activity limit for the week. Barsad shook his head and chuckled. “I was more breakable than I realized.”

Bane nodded in complete agreement as Barsad added. “This is the last job for me.” He stopped short of sharing his domestic fantasy of folding linen with Jenifer until he ceased to live. 

“This is the last for me also,” Bane was quick to adamantly agree.

Barsad shook off Bane’s offer to call it a night. “I’ve got five minutes to show you something I’ve been working on,” he said with an excitable tone and tapped a few times on his tablet’s smudged surface. 

He turned the screen towards Bane and described the slideshow of a chemical compound and eventual pictures of the damage to the human body. The images showcased the stark, vulnerability of human flesh against chemical weapons and fire. 

Barsad described the pyroclastic blast that would cause noxious fumes and third-degree burns. There’d be no room to run or even turn around without tripping in an acidic puddle, like being perched on the rim of a bathtub full of flesh-eating acetone.

Barsad wasn’t too proud to wordlessly accept Bane’s help to the other upstairs bedroom. 

Barsad thanked him at the door and gestured down the hall and pointed out the bathroom and the room where Livia was asleep. 

The two men turned away from each other, no need to voice their mutual respect. 

Bane closed the door behind him and engaged the inexpensive lock, his eyes adjusting quickly to the darkness. 

His eyes found Livia lying on her side away from him, he felt a sharp coil inside him at the newfound knowledge of her cradling a new life. 

Bane undressed before slipping under the linen and molding himself behind her. 

Livia stirred with the warm press of his body. The curve of her bottom brushed against his cock, making him grow rapidly hard against her. 

She started to push her knit pants off before he paused her movement. 

“Is it safe?”

He could feel her skin grow warm under his hands. “Yes, Jenifer and I talked for a while,” she said noncommittally. 

Bane smiled against the curve of her neck as she wriggled her pants down to her ankles and kicked them free. 

He shifted until he could press her back against the mattress and push her knees back to her chest as he spit on his palm and stroked his hand along the length of his painfully hard cock.

Bane dropped his head and found her lips the moment he slid into her, their intimate flesh suddenly close and kissing. Livia cried out into his mouth as he settled into a smoother rhythm and lost himself in the small moans that escaped her lips as her intimacy stretched and pulsed around him as he filled her.

The entire household was asleep when Jenifer returned.

She peeked in on a medicated Barsad and heard nothing behind the other door. Jenifer shook her head as she finished unloading the trunk of groceries and put them away.

She poured herself a crisp white wine from the fridge and kicked off her shoes as she searched the channel guide for something mindless.

As Jenifer found a rerun of an east coast crime show unit that was a spinoff of a sequel, hours away, Blake and Bruce were the only two awake in the roomful of vigilante pursuers. They were deep in conversation about the latest license plate pings and Bane’s sudden disappearance right outside Gotham City limits. 

“He has to be there,” Blake nearly spit as he tapped the tip of his index finger on the heart of Gotham. “He’s going to want to get the job right this time, he’s going to be headstrong with revenge and fuck up,” he added.

“He hasn’t yet,” Bruce gently reminded him.

Blake sulked and crossed his arms. “Then where is he?”

“I think he’s nearby,” Bruce said and launched into an egotistical rant on how he understood Bane’s mind. Bruce’s chest puffed like a rooster in heat as he stated Bane could be as close as the distance an NFL quarterback could throw a pigskin. 

Blake looked over at the door, expecting Bane to come crashing in, kill them all, truss them up and salvage them for parts. 

Time passed as the earth orbited around the sun.

The next day, after Barsad and Bane finished breakfast, they went and sat in the small postage stamp backyard as Jenifer and Livia continued visiting in the warm kitchen with refilled coffee cups and the rest of the cinnamon rolls. 

As the two women gossiped about reality television, Bane and Barsad sat just outside the sliding glass doors and discussed the violent death of their pursuers. As Bane and Barsad let the quiet morning fall around them for a while, hours away, Blake signed for a wheeled cart of room-service fresh coffee and breakfast spread for all the people who wouldn’t stop hunting Bane.

Barsad heard his burner phone ring from inside the house. He hobbled as quickly as he could to the table where it was plugged in and charging. 

Bane closed the sliding glass door and watched Barsad’s unreadable expression as he spoke lowly to the person on the other line. 

After he ended the call, Barsad limped to the living room and swiped and tapped his tablet’s screen maniacally as Bane settled in the chair opposite him. 

“Here they are,” Barsad said with predatory salivation and practically dropped the tablet in his haste to show Bane the screen.

Bane smiled as the drone image stills showed everyone holed up in the hotel in the makeshift command center. A triage station for the untrained and uneducated. 

Barsad and Bane spent the next few hours making calls to various contacts they knew who could acquire objects on an immediate cash-only/no name basis. 

Bane stared down at an image of Blake, captured as he leaned against the stucco wall and chatted up a cleaning lady. 

“You are a child, a baby. I shall consume you until there is nothing left.”


	17. Strong Coffee and Verbal Masturbation

The next seventy-two hours passed in a blur for everyone as deadly plans were outlined, targets globally positioned, and bullets and firearms inventoried. 

In the heart of Gotham City, Jenifer woke up, able to sleep in during her holiday vacation as Livia stirred awake in Bane’s arms down the hall. 

Bane heard Livia’s breathing shift as she began to stir, and he squeezed her tighter in his arms until he could physically shift her and tuck her back against him. She moaned her good mornings as he moved his hand down the front of her body and cupped a hand on her smooth belly, feeling his heart clench in his chest as he knew life was growing under his warm palm. 

Livia gasped as Bane’s hands turned suddenly urgent and he tugged her sleeping shorts down, anxiously teasing his fingertips along the wet folds of her intimacy. 

“Not with them down the hall, they’ll hear,” she whispered on fragmented moans.

“Then you’ll need to not be too loud,” he growled and pulled her onto her back until he could free his rapidly hardening cock and urge her thighs further apart. 

Bane teased the head of his cock against her tight, wet opening as she lifted a hand and cupped his jaw.

“Please don’t leave me and do whatever terrible things you’re going to do.” 

He tried to control his breathing. “I’m not leaving for long,” he murmured and plunged his rigidity deep into her pink, wet center. “I’m going to secure a safe future for you and our child,” he groaned as he pushed her thighs further apart and watched his cock plunge into the epicenter of her femininity. 

“Swear that you’re coming back to me,” Livia gasped as he moved his thumb in uneven circles around her sensitive clit until she was lifting her hips as he shoved himself deep inside her. 

As Bane buried his face in her neck and groaned against her flushed skin as he came in several hot spurts inside her, down the hall, Jenifer helped Barsad climb to his feet.

As he brushed his teeth, she leaned against the door jamb and watched him.

“What’s on your mind?” Barsad finally asked as Jenifer’s brow pulled into a frown. 

“What exactly are you two planning to put into action? Do I need to worry about Livia being here?”

Barsad rinsed his mouth and shook his head as he limped towards her. “I’m going to assist remotely, I put him in touch with some other men who will be hands-on. You’re safe here, so is she.”

Jenifer crossed her arms and assessed Barsad’s words. She finally nodded and reached out and wiped away a speck of peppermint toothpaste that clung to the corner of his lip. 

“How do you want your eggs?” she asked as she pulled on a GU hoodie and made her way down the stairs. 

“Over easy,” he called to her departing form and turned back to his reflection. 

“You need to keep them safe,” he ordered his image, his hair all akimbo from tossing and turning. 

As Barsad dampened his hair and smoothed it down, hours away, Bruce and his fellow vigilante compatriots all crowded around the computer screen that Logano had zoomed in on a shitty cabin not too far away that Bruce believed Bane was holed up in.

Bruce didn’t tell anyone how he had come to know about this ramshackle cabin, but a little bird had called him from a blocked number and claimed to be a former follower of Bane that had awoken to the truth. The caller had stroked Bruce’s ego over the phone, and he could’ve loudly cum in his bat shorts as the caller told him how they had direct knowledge of where the criminal Bane was hiding out and planning an uprising. 

Bruce’s ego was always the loudest voice in his head, and he had no idea that he was talking to Barsad through a voice scrambler. Barsad had called as Bane sat across from him nursing a strong cup of coffee. 

There was a resident inside the cabin as the heat signature detected and displayed on the screen in front of Bruce and pals but it belonged to some off the grid, conspiracy theorist who was more the fraternal twin of the Unabomber than a follower of the Liberator of Gotham and the dead she-bitch Talia who was going to rise like a savior from the slopes of the Himalayas. 

Logano typed a long alpha-numeric chain of characters into a drone feed and the tiny HD camera zoomed in to the blacked-out windows. 

As Bruce and pals loaded up a couple industrial vehicles with enough firepower to equate the explosive energy expended at Chernobyl, hours away Bane loaded up a borrowed SUV with his own cache of firearms and pair of phosphorus grenades purchased in the Sandbox. 

Livia bundled up in a few layers and stood outside as she wordlessly observed Bane pack the heavy vehicle. 

Jenifer looked out the large bay window and watched Livia while she watched Bane. She felt a rush of concern for Livia and smiled as she saw her cradling her nonexistent belly.

Barsad limped into the living room and settled heavily into the plush recliner he was beginning to grow quite fond of with hours of game shows in the afternoon. 

“You’re not going to be in any danger, and he will come back for her,” Barsad said to her back before she turned away from the window.

“You say that with complete confidence.”

“I do,” Barsad murmured, still discovering Bane’s endless capacity to fight his way free from whatever threatened to hold him. He knew his body had been broken over and over, but that Bane would split every inhabitant on the face of the globe from stem to stern and truss them up like venison before he allowed harm to come to Livia or their unborn child. 

“He is more than any common man,” Barsad added before Bane and Livia returned inside from the chilly morning air.

Jenifer handed Bane a small leather satchel.

She spoke before he could ask about the contents. “Some supplies should you need to be your own field medic,” she murmured.

Bane nodded his thanks and conferred with Barsad briefly before taking Livia by the hand and leading her outside so they would have a semblance of privacy.

Bane pulled her cold hands to his mouth and pressed his lips to her fingertips before he dropped to his knees and wrapped his arms suffocatingly tight around her. “I swear I’ll return to your side,” he murmured and pawed away the layers of clothes hiding the supple flesh of her belly from his view.

“I swear,” he whispered as he pressed his lips to the soft skin under her belly button.

Livia settled her hands on the tops of his strong shoulders as he held on to her wordlessly for a few moments. 

He rose to his feet and found her lips, kissing her until she was breathless and then forcing himself to turn from her and practically stomp to the SUV.

Livia watched the vehicle recede until it was long gone from view. Jenifer eventually opened the door and urged her to come back and inside to warm up.

Jenifer made Livia a cup of lemon-hibiscus tea and offered her a mild tranquilizer that would help her relax and not harm the fetus. 

As Livia sipped her tea and sat and stared out the bay window, hoping Bane would slam on the brakes and pull a U-turn and return to Jenifer’s driveway, the flying rodent and his kitty cat friend loaded into one vehicle with Gordon and Blake and the others in the darker of the two industrial vehicles.

As Bane traveled at a swift pace back to the hotel room that Bruce and pals had turned into a command center, Barsad started up his program that he had used to breach the city’s traffic surveillance firewall system and started up one of a few drones he had active in the airspace. 

Jenifer convinced Livia to stop staring out the window and asked her to come upstairs and look at baby stuff online. 

As Jenifer and Livia looked at a few sites hosting popular shopping deals with the holiday upon them, downstairs, Barsad’s lips pulled into a smile as he used a remote drone to track the child bat and declawed kitten traveled to the off the grid shack. 

He sent a character-free message to Bane that would just chime to let him know that the children had left their tree house and were going to go engage in war games with water guns against a real soldier.

Barsad sent another set of blank messages to several soldiers of fortune that now worked for whoever paid the highest. 

The trio of war hardened men, each dead-eyed with a thousand-yard stare that could melt the frozen tundra converged on the temporarily empty hotel command center and set out several square blocks of pasty white C4 and untangled yellow and black wires that they attached firmly to a several detonators. 

The men worked silently and efficiently, in and out of the room as quietly as they had descended as Bruce and Selina led the way to the shack that held no one of danger, prominence or remote importance. 

The whole squad of vigilantes surrounded the shack and kicked in the splintery door and busted out the blacked-out windows.

Blake tossed a flash grenade in the tiny room and gave a victory cry when a low painful bellow sounded from inside. 

Bruce pulled the trigger on an elaborate titanium device that was phallic in nature and a net contraption shot out and cloaked who he thought was Bane waving his arms around blindly in the smoke-filled room. 

Bruce and Blake yanked on the other end of the cord and yanked out the netted fresh catch of the day.

“Who the fuck are you?” Blake shouted and grabbed the middle-aged, high school dropout off the ground and shook him until he nearly pissed himself in fear.  
Bruce pulled Blake off the man as he tried to make order of what was unfolding in front of him. 

“Who are you?” he asked the shaking man.

“Bob, Robert…… Fitzgerald, sir,” the man stammered.

“What are you doing here?”

“It’s my right to be here,” Bob said defensively and tried to stand up straighter. 

Bruce shook his head as Selina ran Bob’s name and location through the defense system’s database and confirmed a Robert Joseph Fitzgerald who had a mental breakdown after the housing market crashed, a former hedge fund executive who abandoned money and embraced conspiracy as a life source. 

Barsad watched from the drone’s recording eyes as the juvenile bat with his half-dropped balls and entourage threatened Robert Fitzgerald into silence and left his already shitty shed in a further dilapidated state. 

They tore back to the hotel room turned command center as the paid militant’s took their planned spots in the trees and on the rooftop. 

Bane was still en route, pressing the accelerator as far as it would go to the floor as he closed the distance between himself and securing a safe future for Livia and their unborn child.

“Your pathetic lives will be over soon, you’ve suckled at the teats of decadence and been sheltered longer than deserved,” Bane murmured and urged the large engine to suck up more gas and rapidly devour the miles between himself and liberation.


	18. The Eye in the Sky

Blake and his murderous company arrived back at the hotel, unaware of the soulless paid men-for-hire waiting with scopes on long rifles, their precision and accuracy was unmatched by all but the Goddess Diana.

Gunfire erupted before Bane arrived, the smell of gunpowder still heavy in the air.

Bane was called by one of the militants who had taken a bullet to the shoulder that the hotel parking lot had become a war zone.

Bane pulled the beastly vehicle to a halt and took cover. He pulled a pair of binoculars from an old leather case.

His magnified view caught a definitely dead Logano in the middle of the parking lot, even from the distance, anyone could see that Logano had died of near-complete exsanguination. 

Bane saw shadows and could tell there were people taking cover behind a dented royal-blue set of dumpsters and a couple random shapes behind a bulky SUV and sleek Jaguar with ugly wheels. 

One of the snipes fired at a face that darted around the dumpster and missed but made Selina give a shout. 

“There’s that feline bitch,” Bane thought when he heard the grating pitch of Selina’s voice.

As the remaining living armed people in the parking lot all regrouped and strategized, back at Jenifer’s cozy home, Barsad focused his complete attention on the HD screen of the drone’s real time recording. 

He had asked Jenifer to keep Livia occupied so he could concentrate on being Bane’s remote support. Barsad adjusted the mouthpiece of a wireless headset. His voice transmitted to a small, curved plastic apparatus nestled deep in Bane’s ear.

While Barsad maneuvered the drone through the air, it’s recording eye seeking Blake and the others, upstairs, Jenifer finally convinced Livia to soak in the bathtub with some relaxing lavender-vanilla bath salts. 

Jenifer averted her eyes as Livia undressed and slipped into the hot water, letting out a deep breath as the water swallowed hurt and began urging warmth throughout her body. 

Jenifer settled on the edge of the tub and soaked a washcloth before running an oblong bar of soap over it. She scrubbed Livia’s back before speaking. “When I go to the store next, I’ll pick you up some prenatal vitamins. Do you have a regular OBGYN or do you need help securing one?” 

“I went last year for a pap, but I’m not attached to her,” Livia said as she stared down at her cuticles. 

As Jenifer helped Livia wash her hair and massage in a thick, luxurious conditioner, back in the hotel parking lot turned slaughterhouse in waiting, Bane listened as Barsad told him where Blake was crouched behind a classic Plymouth and moving at a snail’s pace on his belly to where Bane was squatted behind the SUV.

From the screen, Blake looked exactly like the reptile he was, masquerading as a man throughout his life. 

Bane dropped back silently into the cover of a thicket of blooming morning glory vines. He moved laterally and ended up coming up behind Blake. 

Bane wanted to draw zero attention to the recently parked SUV and slipped his gun into his rear waistband and pulled out a small knife with a wickedly sharp blade. 

Bane pounced on Blake in the manner of the true apex predator he was and buried the curved platinum blade deep into Blake’s neck, severing his arterial and vascular intersection. Bane’s hand was soon warm and wet with Blake’s blood as his life drained from him and his body twitched under Bane’s crushing weight. 

Bane continued moving after he wiped his blade clean and stripped Blake’s warm body of weapons. He had messaged one of the paid men perched in the tree of the kitty cat hiding behind the dumpster. 

A bright series of flashes and loud bangs broke the air as the sniper in the tree hurled a set of flash grenades at the dented dumpsters.

Bane listened as Selina gave a final death cry and fell silent along with a cook from the hotel who had been caught outside at the wrong time on a designated break. 

As Bane advanced closer towards the hotel in search of the juvenile masked rodent, back at Jenifer’s home, Livia leaned back against the back of the tub and laid the washcloth over her eyes as Jenifer gave her some time to herself. She had a billion emails to answer and had to prepare a plausible story for when she was questioned about her missing patient.

Her email inbox didn’t disappoint with the glut of messages about the missing patient. Jenifer felt some of her anxiety lessen as the general consensus was the patient wandered off, highlighting the not complete understanding effects of head injuries. 

Jenifer scanned an article in the local paper about Barsad’s sudden disappearance. He was still listed as a John Doe in the article and a description was listed as well as GCPD’s phone number and missing persons extension. 

She listened as the bathwater splashed, followed by the sound of the water draining. Jenifer looked up as Livia walked in while tying the bathrobe’s belt into a big, looping bow. 

“There’s some pajamas in the second drawer, wear whatever you find comfortable,” Jenifer said as she pointed at her dark dresser.

Livia rooted around for some comfortable clothes and disappeared back inside the bathroom to change. She sat back down on Jenifer’s bed and reached for a gossip magazine on the nightstand. Livia lost herself in the glossy photos of celebrity cellulite and who was fucking who as Jenifer replied to some emails and set up some online bill pay. 

As Livia chuckled at an article about a celebrity tiff, hours away in the hotel parking lot, Bane pivoted sharply on his heel and stumbled to the ground as a bullet tore a hot path into the meat and muscle of his right shoulder. 

He wouldn’t have had time to raise his gun before Nabokov’s head exploded like a swollen, burst watermelon. Bits of brain, shiny white skull fragments and fleshy chunks rained over Bane from where he had awkwardly landed on the gravel ground.

As Bane brushed wet viscera from the front of his tactical vest, the tree where the sniper was still waiting, his finger on the trigger, was suddenly consumed in fire and a hailstorm of bullets as Batman came down from the sky in one of his flying contraptions and unleashed hellfire on the poor tree that committed the crime of growing. 

The sniper that was nestled among the leaves, died a nearly instantaneous death as his body was consumed by a refined explosive that burned like the progeny of napalm and yellow cake uranium. 

Bruce turned the muzzle of the loaded missile chamber at the other sniper that was trying to run for cover behind the other set of dumpsters. The set of dumpsters that the paid murderer was running to were dark green and designated for recyclables only.

The highly paid solider-of-fortune didn’t make it.

Bruce cut down the man and nearly bisected his body in a spray of armor-piercing rounds. The man’s soft flesh was no match and parted easily with each bullet’s hot killing kiss. 

Gordon watched the military display of force from Bruce who landed his rodent-jet in the middle of the parking lot. 

Bruce was so focused on getting to Selina’s side even though he knew she was gone that he didn’t see anything else but the heavy smoke that surrounded the blue dumpsters. The illogical part of him hoped she had a pulse, and that Lucius Fox could build her whatever limbs had been blown off. 

Bruce picked up the pace and was nearly sprinting to the dumpsters when he was suddenly tackled and knocked on the ground as Bane brought him to the ground and began delivering sharp kicks to his mid-section, back and head. 

Bruce was able to knock Bane’s feet out from him and got his own bearings and balance as Bane fell heavily to the ground.

The remaining injured paid militant and Gordon watched the two powerful men fight.

Bruce and Batman were two bull elephants battling for dominance on the Serengeti, only one could remain. 

As Bane and Bruce roared as they met each physical blow with one of even more force, back in Jenifer’s home, Barsad watched with awe at Bane’s agility even with blood running down the back of his muscular triceps.

Upstairs, Livia and Jenifer chatted about a whole host of topics as Livia switched on the television and couldn’t believe when she stumbled across one of her favorite films that was filmed nearby but was supposed to be some part of France. 

As Livia fell into the well-memorized plotline and Jenifer added some prenatal vitamins to a virtual shopping cart from a big-box retailer, back at the hotel death match, Bruce was able to plunge a stiletto blade into Bane’s injured shoulder.

Bane grunted and was filled with explosive rage as the blade penetrated the same wet hole the bullet had made as it pierced his muscular flesh. 

Bane slid one hand over Bruce’s and manipulated his thumb into a Jiu-jitsu hold and the other hand to the collar of his cowl. Bane yanked Bruce down by the neck of his bat costume and raised his knee to meet Bruce’s nose.

Bruce’s handsome face was soon bathed in blood as his nose shattered with the force of meeting Bane’s knee. 

Bruce dropped heavily to one knee as he reflexively brought one hand to the center of his face.

Bane capitalized on Bruce’s human instincts and pulled the gun fluidly from the small of his back and soon had the end of the barrel pushed against Bruce’s straight white teeth. 

Bruce’s undertaker would later have to use porcelain gaps for the open casket viewing. 

“You’ve died for nothing, there is no honor here,” Bane murmured before he pulled the trigger in rapid succession until the gun clicked empty. 

As he killed the man bat, Gordon had begun to advance from the room towards Bane’s turned back.

Gordon was stopped short by several fired rounds from the wounded sniper who had been clinging to consciousness nearby, his homemade tourniquet was beginning to fail, and he was losing blood fast.

The man who saved Bane’s life died before the paramedics arrived and called for a coroner after turning off their lights and cutting the sirens.


	19. The World

Bane watched from a safe distance as the emergency medical personnel and GCPD swarmed the hotel parking lot turned crime scene.

The burning of his raw, bleeding bullet wound brought his eyes to the torn flesh. He rooted through the first aid kit Jenifer had put together and performed some shoddy field surgery and bound his shoulder tight. 

He forced himself to drive back to Jenifer’s at a law-abiding speed. He wanted to press the accelerator to the floor and return to Livia’s side and the new life that was growing inside her.

Bane had not even put the bulky SUV in park before the front door of Jenifer’s home opened and Livia was running towards the driver’s side.

He managed to set the emergency brake before he pushed open the door and wrapped her up in his arms, feeling himself become whole again. The ill feeling in the pit of his stomach evaporated as he swallowed her up in his formidable embrace.

Jenifer and Barsad watched from the large bay window a moment before pulling the curtains closed and giving them privacy. Barsad closed down the many computer programs that were running and set the laptop aside, he didn’t plan on needing them again. 

Bane gathered up Livia in his arms, she was dressed poorly for the brisk morning. He carried her bridal style over the threshold. Jenifer treated and cleaned up his wound before stitching it closed and securing it with clean bandages. 

Later that night before Bane drifted off to sleep, he felt Livia’s hand press against his chest, over his heart. “No more fighting,” she whispered to the dark. 

Bane settled his hand over hers and held her hand closer. “No more fighting,” he confirmed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Just about One Year Later ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Livia save some hot water for everyone else,” Jenifer shouted up the stairs and listened to Livia’s grumbling as she turned off the faucet. 

Bane looked up and chuckled when Livia appeared in their bedroom doorway, wrapping her wet hair up in a blue towel. 

As Livia towel-dried under the weight of Bane’s stare, on the other coastline, Sara Gordon bustled about the kitchen that faced the majesty of the Pacific Ocean.

“Is there more coffee?”

Sara smiled and carried the half-empty carafe to the round kitchen table. She pressed her lips to Jim Gordon’s temple as she refilled his ceramic mug with the chipped handle. 

“Do you have physical therapy today with Rob or Maya?” Sara asked as she topped off her own mug and took a bite of crispy hash browns glistening with the oil she had fried it in. 

She hid her smile when Jim grumbled about having to see Maya. 

The hotel shoot-out had left Jim with his life but also bullet fragments lodged in his lower back and weekly physical therapy. Sara was pleased he needed to retire early and relocate to the other coastline and be closer to her family. Maya was a sweet woman but a drill sergeant when it came to the physical work. 

As Jim finished his coffee and prepared for a strenuous therapy session, back in the heart of Gotham City, Livia pulled her wet hair into a bun and slipped into some loose drawstring pants and a hooded GU sweatshirt. 

She spun her dazzling ring set back into place, smiling as she remembered the four of them taking an impromptu trip to Vegas and having a double wedding. 

“Thank you,” Bane said as she slipped on a pair of green-striped socks. 

Livia looked up when he repeated himself.

“Thank you for a life I never knew was possible and thank you for him,” Bane said and rocked their sleeping baby boy Gaius Mikhail. 

Livia closed the distance between them and settled next to Bane and their sleeping child. 

“Thank you for giving me the world,” he murmured before he was content to listen to their combined breathing until the earth stopped spinning.


End file.
